If your life feels empty and lonely despite the fact that you do all the things that you're
supposed to do to fill up your life, you might be a covert avoider. You might have a good career,
you're friendly, you're interesting, there's people in your life, but you feel like nothing
is connecting and it's all superficial and it's not giving you happiness. If that's
happening it's time for you to ask yourself if you're secretly avoiding your own life.
This is a really normal thing for people who had trauma when they were kids, and if that's
you you probably got really good at looking okay on the outside, being cheerful and appropriate
and functioning, while secretly you learn to protect your inner state by avoiding any kind
of situation that might trigger you, things like rejection, criticism, getting abandoned.
My name is Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy and I teach people how to heal
childhood PTSD symptoms so they can get free of trauma and become their real selves, become who
they're meant to be and that is what I want for you. Now if you grew up abused and neglected,
those things can make you feel destroyed; but if you go through life protecting yourself from it,
that destroys you too. So on one side you get triggered and you risk falling apart and on
the other side you get hollowed out and you get robbed of the experience of real love and purpose
and the connection to other people that everyone needs. Without it our development gets frozen,
we're like sad children wandering around. I don't want that to be you. Now I call the problem
covert avoidance because it's not like avoidant personality disorder, you've probably heard of
that you maybe have known people who have it, it's an extreme kind of anxiety and social avoidance
and it's on a level that would be fairly noticeable to other people, some of you...if
you do have that you can put in the comments what it's like, how people respond to that, what
kind of feedback you get. But covert avoidance isn't noticeable to other people, you seem okay,
you're more or less interacting with the world but you're on a lot of levels holding yourself apart
from it and you might not even be fully aware that you're doing it but i'll tell you how to know that
this is happening. You feel like you're too busy or too tired all the time to do normal things that
a person in your position would do; keeping your living space tidy, making decent food for yourself
maybe your kids, going to bed on time, getting up on time, when you're avoiding this level
of functioning it's an inward directed kind of avoidance. Then there are outward behaviors like
you might be late to things, it's normal to be late occasionally, but if you're known for being
late or you're late by about the same amount every time, it's avoidance. And that was the big obvious
sign that I had back about 16 years ago at the end of my first marriage when my kids were small.
I was pretty much late to everything, if a dinner party started at six o'clock i'd be there at 6:45,
if a client phone call started at 9am i'd come in at 9:02, if a group of friends were meeting
up just to go hiking I'd keep everybody waiting 20 minutes. And you know sure there was traffic,
I couldn't find my son's shoes or whatever the obstacle seemed to be, I always had my reasons
I was busy, I was juggling a lot, I was always telling people how busy I was in fact even though
that's like one of the most boring stories we can share, "I'm so busy you guys let me tell you about
it." But it was a way to keep everyone's focus off of my inner life and how bad things were going.
And the thing is, even though I was juggling a lot at the time you know I was a working single mom,
but you could take everything I did in a day that was.. that I was showing up late for,
and I could do it in the same amount of time but just shifted 20 minutes earlier
and then be on time for everything it would be so much less stressful.
But in my mind I couldn't make that shift because I thought I was busy.
In reality I was shutting people out I was shutting my life out, I was angry at my life
and I was frustrated at all the trouble I had and I didn't want it anymore. And in particular
I was unhappy about my marriage which was so hard and I was overwhelmed emotionally pretty
much all the time during that period. If I were to actually open up to friends or leave the marriage,
well I just felt like I couldn't do it I felt like I was barely holding myself together as it was so,
I did what I had always known to do under pressure and that's just muddle through.
There's a lot to be said for just pushing through bad times it's a superpower for
those of us who get really triggered by life, it's a good thing to know how to do but there
comes a time when the avoiding has to stop if you're gonna be happy. If your circumstances are
destroying your spirit, it is time to change. So what happened for me is I ended up in the hospital
and I needed this major surgery and this was right after my kid's dad and I had separated and we were
hardly speaking to each other and because i'd formed only these superficial you know put on
a happy face kind of friendships, I wasn't close to anybody anymore and that meant I had almost no
support. I went a whole week in the hospital with just one visitor and when it was time to go home
I needed somebody who could come pick me up and drive me because actually it's a requirement, like
they can't let you just go home in a taxi you have to be picked up by somebody, I didn't have anyone.
The surgery had been a disaster, I was going to end up needing a lot more surgery in the future
after that but that day, I had to call like 10 people to find one who was willing to pick me up.
So I just want to say okay so I did have someone but I got home, and I could barely walk or get
to the bathroom, I definitely couldn't get groceries or clean and because I had
to keep caring for my kids and doing work on my computer from home, I never got proper rest and
I couldn't physically recover and that's all like another story for another video sometime
but that's what chronic avoidance will get you. You...you might get through one crisis by avoiding
people and life, but the next crisis will come and it will lay you low and you'll face for real
what's left when you spent years thinking you had no choice but to protect yourself,
protecting that fragile place inside that lives in fear of being judged and left out and alone,
in the long run avoidance makes you alone. So how do you turn covert avoidance around?
It is not easy but, when this all changed for me I found it was pretty common sense and i'll
tell you exactly how I did it. So the first thing is, you got to get super honest with
yourself about your current circumstances and what is likely to happen if you don't change.
You've got to become more conscious of why you're avoiding your own life, there's a very good reason
even if it's not actually good for you but it helps to know and understand what you're
trying to protect yourself from. When we were abused or neglected as kids, our little nervous
systems got thrown off kilter by something called dysregulation. This is neurological it's happening
in your brain and body and it can go on and keep getting worse your whole life if you don't learn
to notice dysregulation and master re-regulation. Now if you do a brain scan of someone who had an
intensely stressful childhood and you talk to them now about something that's triggering for them,
what you'll see on the scan is that brain waves change from a flowing and synchronized pattern,
into a chaotic pattern where parts of your brain are lighting up and firing in an unsynchronized
way. Your heart rate and breathing, which are normally working in tandem too, they also get out
of sync and the result is called dysregulation. What it feels like when it's happening is being
discombobulated, clumsy, a little disoriented, sensitive maybe to touch or light or sound,
emotionally overreactive and sometimes the opposite checked out,
emotionally flat, just spacey. Dysregulation isn't just a feeling though, it's a
disruption that affects all your body systems and it can be very serious over time for your health,
so it's super important to learn to re-regulate but until you do,
anything that causes you stress is going to run the risk of throwing you into dysregulation
and it can take hours or days to come back from that have you experienced that?
That's why CPTSD can be so debilitating. Now everybody gets stressed sometimes but not
everybody gets dysregulated and since most people with CPTSD have never even heard of dysregulation,
they're going through life with this vulnerability to stress that can make it
disabling. Now other people seem to be fine participating in groups or forming close
friendships and we may compare ourselves but they're not dysregulated, so we judge ourselves
and then we instinctively learn how to protect our brain and nervous system by avoiding stress.
And let's be real, people cause stress. Getting involved in things causes stress,
being real and emotionally open and honest can leave us open to rejection and criticism and that
causes huge stress so instinctively we keep all these stressors just at arm's length. In our minds
it may seem like there's an external reason for why we fall apart inside or we find excuses not to
show up on time, not to participate in the school fundraiser, not answer the phone call or have the
vulnerable conversation, but really, we're just trying to stave off dysregulation and doing that
day after day and year after year starts gutting the connections and habits that keep us happy and
then we have to look for ways to numb that too. One friend of mine, who's incredibly insightful,
said she used to go to parties with a camera around her neck so that if she were speaking to
somebody for more than a minute or two she could say that she needed to leave the conversation
"oh I gotta go take pictures" or she used a clipboard in her hand with a pen, i've done that,
you can walk around like you're enjoying the party but you're actually playing the role of I don't
know an observer, an anthropologist, somebody who works there and not just a person among equals
having fun. When you're doing that kind of thing you're really just holding dysregulation at bay,
playing fake with the good people who are standing right in front of you but you're wondering
why do I feel so alone? It's because you're not really there. So that's how it happens, some of
us do it by looking at our phones all the time, some of us do it by taking unfulfilling jobs that
we hate and then postponing the day when we'll start living our life until
after we leave the job that we never should have taken in the first place. Then we've got a great
excuse not to volunteer at the school or to take a walk with a friend or to collapse onto the
sofa in the evening. And even at home we can do covert avoidance with people we love just going
through the motions or we stay with people we never loved just buying some time for the day
when we can emotionally handle making changes. You could do avoidance through food, drugs, alcohol,
video games, porn, through anything that numbs you telling yourself that as soon as you can stop,
you get out there and start your life again. I totally get it, until you have a way to calm
your triggers and handle stress when it comes, because it always comes, your CPTSD is going to
control you it's going to dictate that you will be cut off from your own life. And thankfully, there
is a way to calm your triggers and re-regulate so you don't have to avoid anything and I can
teach you that. That's where to start, you don't have to fix your whole life at once,
sometimes if you just orient yourself toward healing and you...you can do one small thing
a day, then more changes follow naturally like dominoes. It's not about talking more about what
happened to you in the past, it's about noticing the triggers you have right now and calming them
and then using that moment of calm to make some progress to go say hello to your neighbor or
answer a couple emails or clean the kitchen or break down some boxes for recycling from all that
toilet paper you bought on amazon. It feels good to take care of your life and it's possible to
challenge yourself a little bit when you know that you always have a quiet place to come back
to. Now if you're new to my channel you're going to want to check out the free course,
the daily practice. There's always a link to that in the description section below so if
you don't know that yet or you don't have a way to pull back from a stress state of your own,
you can learn my techniques and see if they don't help you to calm down and give you some
energy back to do the things that make your life happier and fuller. Healing doesn't have to be
torture and it does not have to go on forever before you start to feel better we need to
feel better right now. If dysregulation is what you have, don't be mean to it,
calm your triggers, take small steps consistently every day it's not always easy but it's not
rocket science either. If this topic of feeling empty and avoiding people resonates with you,
I recommend that you watch this video right here it goes a little deeper into the ways that CPTSD
can empty out your life and how you can come back and thrive stronger and more connected than ever.