it is so common for people who had childhood trauma to go through life feeling disconnected and
unimportant to other people and a big piece of that is feeling not heard people don't listen
when you express yourself or they listen but they either don't get it or they don't believe you
or they don't care do you ever feel like you are not heard i'm anna runkle also known as the
crappy childhood fairy and i'm in my makeshift studios here in los angeles because back in my
native bay area there is so much smoke i was losing my voice you can kind of hear it right
well in this video i want to talk about some reasons why you're not feeling heard now if
you're like all of us with cptsd one of your first questions is is the other person actually
making me feel this terrible feeling of not being heard are they doing this on purpose because they
think i'm not worth it or they want to dramatize to me how much they don't care or am i actually
doing something that sabotages my own ability to be heard and the short answer is usually
probably some of both so let's talk about the other people are doing this to me scenario this
definitely happens some people really actually are too self-centered to pay attention to other people
or to care or to pay sufficient attention to to get what you're saying to understand it we all
know these kinds of people and if we went through trauma as kids there's a pretty good chance that
one or both of our parents had some of these same sort of hearing problems at times themselves right
they couldn't hear us because either they were drunk high depressed obsessed or just too screwed
up to hear anyone and a lot of us with unhealed cptsd have this very unfortunate tendency to
collect people like that as friends and partners and this can range from ordinary you know non-ptsd
relationship dynamics where one person says hey i feel like you're not hearing me and the
other person just kind of rolls their eyes right that happens that could happen to anybody in any
relationship but it could also range up to more pronounced problems people with a personality
disorder or an addiction or people with just years and years of resentment where they are literally
incapable of being present and taking in what you might be saying or we might find ourselves
and this would be true in the early stages of a relationship with an extremely self-centered
person maybe one with narcissistic tendencies that they seem like they pay intense attention to us
so incredibly but then for no apparent reason the rug comes out they don't care about you they
hear nothing right that's called the discard phase and the days of caring about you are
over and i know a lot of you watching have suffered in relationships like that and i'm hoping
you're at the stage of recovery where you're able to see those red flags now
the too good to be true behavior that comes before they throw you away and to hold yourself
separate from attaching to that kind of person or having expectations of them in any way because
no good thing ever comes from trying to make things work with someone who doesn't care about
you i talk about this extensively and what to do about it in my dating and relationships course
for people with childhood ptsd if you want to find out about that i've put a link to it
in the description section below but basically if you're still dating hooking up with sleeping with
marrying attaching to chasing texting pining away for someone who cannot and will not hear you
because they don't care then this takes us right into the other category of causes not another
person but who right well at this point when you see what you're dealing with and you don't leave
then the problem lies not with them but with you and you know i'm the tough love fairy right and
i'm telling you this is what we do when we're not healed yet we complain about someone not hearing
us but we keep thinking we can make them change if we can just explain it right or be nice enough or
lose some weight or whatever imaginary thing we're blaming ourselves for and actually we do have some
blame at this point not for failing to change but for holding on and i think most people with cptsd
have done this somewhere between two and 200 times right so clinging to someone who is incapable of
giving a crap about us is one way that we cause ourselves to not feel heard or indeed be heard
but let's talk about the subtler ways that we might play a role in this sometimes we're
not heard because of the energy we're bringing to an interaction or because of the way we're
communicating let's talk about the communication first the fact is that the effects of trauma
especially when we're under pressure like in an argument or when we're upset it can distort
or jumble our thoughts and words does this happen to you it is part of brain dysregulation and
emotional dysregulation and dysregulation is what cptsd is made of it's what it does
it's what drives most of the other symptoms we might be having after growing up with
abuse and neglect now when you're in this kind of dysregulated state the urgency of feelings feel
like they're crystal clear they have to come out and the feelings might be clear but they come out
just like a tsunami run on breathless desperate and this is hard for other people to hear
and if that person who you want to hear you has defenses going up because that intensity is scary
for them guess what you're not going to feel heard i'm sure you've been on the receiving end too
and it can feel overwhelming even threatening when someone's getting all verbally intense on you you
can't think you can't get a word in edgewise and when they tell you that you're just not hearing me
you might feel like you just want to give up and flee right you want to leave the room storm out
check out in your mind or you do that subtle kind of nice face but closed heart trick you know what
i'm talking about where you're like sure i hear you do you have that the good face to make another
person feel heard even while you're thinking this person is horrible and to be honest sometimes
cptsd does make us horrible and this is one of the harder to talk about reasons why we
don't get heard and it's not just because we're communicating in an intense way but because we're
communicating in an unfair or even hurtful way maybe we're being manipulative and remember we
never think we're being manipulative but if you're having a hard time being direct about
what you want and you're trying to dress it up with something you think will be more acceptable
but you find yourself getting into arguments because you aren't getting what you want
there's a good chance that your communication has gotten a smidge or two of manipulation in it and
people will instinctively recoil from that if they have any bs detectors at all when you manipulate
people through vague complaints or cold silence or guilt trips or fudging the truth or any of
the little ways that we avoid saying directly you know hey i'm feeling lonely or i'm feeling
angry or insecure or whatever and i want to stop what we're doing right now and ask your help so i
can get myself emotionally back on track again when we use those subtle forms of manipulation
it's ultimately going to make the hearing problem worse you ever notice that when you're not real
about your feelings there's absolutely nothing the other person can do to make you feel better
and that's the telltale sign that some conflict with someone isn't what it seems it's a false
conflict and the sign is that no matter what you or they do to fix it or help you can't fix
it the problem is something else and it takes honesty to get to what that is and even then
what is honest is sometimes that the problem is unsolvable and so when you're in a long dragged
out conflict that's going nowhere and you're not feeling heard this is something to ask yourself
is what i am trying to express the real fair true expression of my feelings not trying to punish the
other person or exaggerate or minimize or mask feelings so you ask yourself that and sometimes
you just have to be willing to get more fair and honest and i do have tools for that in my courses
we'll talk about that in a second in reality a lot of times we manipulate when we don't even know why
we feel so unheard or unloved we're just deep in a belief that the bad feeling that we're feeling
it must be caused by somebody else and therefore we believe that they must be the ones to fix it
we're looking for a fix that in reality no one can give us we're in a flashback the argument
we're having is just making it worse we end up begging to be comforted and then we can't be
comforted so it helps to know that another person can really only be supportive but the fix is not
theirs to give us this is this is that whole inside that only our own healing from trauma can
fill and part of that takes time and part of it can start right away and that's what i teach
sometimes pain the pain of not being heard of not being able to solve problems in relationships
sometimes that pain is the catalyst that makes good changes possible so where you are right
now is an okay place to start you don't there's nothing you have to get together to begin healing
where you are is a good place it starts with one believing that healing is possible
you've got to throw out all those ideas that you're doomed you're cursed
this is a state of being for the rest of your life it's not so i'm here to show you it's not so
second you need to adopt a steady day-by-day application of simple common sense steps that
will begin to move you out of that triggered dysregulated state so that you can think and
breathe and compose your thoughts and make choices and the fruit of all that before you know it
is that you start being heard so if you want to work with me come on into my membership program
you know where to find all the info it's in the description section below this video
it's good to be heard it's important and i want you to have that after all that you've been
through you totally deserve the secure connected and witnessed feeling that comes when your cptsd
healing process empowers you to have that kind of relationship and i will see you next week