Ever found yourself trapped behind a mask you adopted to survive a tumultuous past? You're not alone. My journey with complex PTSD has been marked with moments of shutting down, freezing and disassociating - coping mechanisms that shadowed my childhood trauma. This episode peels back the layers of that journey, articulating how I learnt to live healthily amidst the emotional turmoil. Our conversation ventures into the waters of change, finding joy in life and allowing ourselves to share bits of our life with others.
Delving into the second layer of the episode, we unpack the concept of authenticity and self-acceptance. Have you ever realized how we often adopt other people's values and preferences just to fit in? Well, the cost is losing sight of our own true self. We dig into this journey of self-discovery, unmasking our authentic selves and navigating the fear of being genuine with others. We discuss how staying present in our bodies can bridge us to others and ourselves, creating a path to self-acceptance. So, come aboard as we journey together towards healing, self-discovery and ultimately, becoming our own individuals.
Also, DM me if you would like to chat about how I can help you in your journey to emotional health and balance.
This podcast is not meant to take the place of therapy, to diagnose or treat anyone. I have had therapy as recently as 2021 and found it very helpful. I am not a doctor. My only degree is in computers. I am simply sharing tools I have used to help myself grow to become an emotionally healthy person and sharing stories about my journey. Please seek medical help, as I did, if you are unable to cope with life and all that it brings.
Acoustic/Folk Instrumental by Hyde - Free Instrumentals https://soundcloud.com/davidhydemusic Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/acoustic-folk-instrumental Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/YKdXVnaHfo8
Ever found yourself trapped behind a mask you adopted to survive a tumultuous past? You're not alone. My journey with complex PTSD has been marked with moments of shutting down, freezing and disassociating - coping mechanisms that shadowed my childhood trauma. This episode peels back the layers of that journey, articulating how I learnt to live healthily amidst the emotional turmoil. Our conversation ventures into the waters of change, finding joy in life and allowing ourselves to share bits of our life with others.
Delving into the second layer of the episode, we unpack the concept of authenticity and self-acceptance. Have you ever realized how we often adopt other people's values and preferences just to fit in? Well, the cost is losing sight of our own true self. We dig into this journey of self-discovery, unmasking our authentic selves and navigating the fear of being genuine with others. We discuss how staying present in our bodies can bridge us to others and ourselves, creating a path to self-acceptance. So, come aboard as we journey together towards healing, self-discovery and ultimately, becoming our own individuals.
Also, DM me if you would like to chat about how I can help you in your journey to emotional health and balance.
This podcast is not meant to take the place of therapy, to diagnose or treat anyone. I have had therapy as recently as 2021 and found it very helpful. I am not a doctor. My only degree is in computers. I am simply sharing tools I have used to help myself grow to become an emotionally healthy person and sharing stories about my journey. Please seek medical help, as I did, if you are unable to cope with life and all that it brings.
Acoustic/Folk Instrumental by Hyde - Free Instrumentals https://soundcloud.com/davidhydemusic Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/acoustic-folk-instrumental Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/YKdXVnaHfo8
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Hidden Healing Podcast. Thank you for stopping by to take a listen. I have a few questions for you. Did you grow up with a lot of adverse childhood experiences? Do you live in the toxic stress of fight or flight, feeling constantly triggered by things that make you feel unsafe? Well, you're in the right place. Listen in as I share stories and lessons from my journey in healing from complex PTSD. Listening to this podcast will help you learn to retrain your nervous system so that you feel safe and experience fewer triggers, and learn how over functioning no longer serves you and how the key to healing lies in your identity and your somatic recovery. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Speaker 1:
I didn't know until a couple years ago that when a child has long term abuse, neglect or general family dysfunction, their brain basically assumes that there's always danger to protect themselves from. So coping by disassociating, freezing or shutting down our normal reactions, their coping mechanisms that they learn in order to continue to be safe and regulating emotions just really becomes overwhelming. So we tend to learn how to live outside of our body. All of that to say that before I started this podcast and this journey to healing emotional complex trauma, I never learned how to be emotionally healthy. I did a lot of specific work around my trauma, both traditional therapies and other less traditional modalities, but I didn't do a lot of healing with all of the coping mechanisms, all the new strategies that I developed as a child, and so I healed the wounds, but I still had depression. I still had a lot of stress and anxiety around friendships and other people, and I would shut down when I got overwhelmed. I felt very isolated and alone. I know that people like me in general and I know that I had friends, but I still felt lonely and I felt like I didn't belong anywhere. So here I am, 50 years old, starting season three of this podcast, the Hidden Healing, and I'm really excited about it because I'm sharing how I am learning to be healthy in real time. I'm sharing real experiences that are going on in my life and what it really looks like to do the work of becoming emotionally healthy on a daily basis.
Speaker 1:
So why did I choose to call this the Hidden healing podcast, and why is this work something that I feel is hidden? It's because, like I mentioned, I did therapy, I did what I thought was doing work to become emotionally healthy, and those were steps in the right direction and they definitely helped me deal with my trauma, help me get that out, so that I didn't carry shame and all of the really the emotion in my body around that. But there was still a lot of work that had to be done and so much like a buried treasure where you have to dig for it to find it, do some hard work. That is what it's like to get back to who you were meant to be when you were born, who you were when you had a clean slate, and so I hope that you look forward to joining me on this journey where I share my experiences so that you're able to learn in a way that is not right next to you. It's not about you, it's not about what's going on in your life, so that it doesn't throw you into complex trauma. It doesn't throw you into reaction mode or triggered mode. It actually lets it be so that you can see on someone else and then, as you contemplate later on, you can see oh yeah, I do that too. Oh yeah, I think I'd like to change this or I'd like to change that. So that's my plan and that's what I work on this podcast for, so that together we can all become emotionally healthy people who no longer feel lonely but have deep relationships.
Speaker 1:
So sometimes what happens to people different ages in life, but kind of the stage where you have spent so much time raising children or taking care of the people around you if you don't have children that you've given everything of yourself and there's not a lot left for you. Recently, I had a friend in a group mention that she gives her 100% to her family, to caretaking an individual in her family, and I pointed out if you give 100% to them, there's nothing left for you. We can't do that, but if you grew up with complex trauma, then that's just what you do. And so at this point in life, when you have this awakening, you realize that this life you created, even though you created, it is not working for you, and maybe it never has worked for you, but it's what you have done to survive, to make peace where you're at. And so now, what do you do? Well, I found myself in this exact position and just woke up and was like I can no longer do this.
Speaker 1:
I've mentioned this in past seasons, so this is not a new piece of information, but I went to my husband and I said, look, I don't know what has to change, but I am done with whatever we have going on here and I'm like I don't know what to say or do. But I don't even know what I want. But I know that if I live the same way one more day, that it is is not going to work for me. So you maybe hit that stage too. Hit the stage where you're like it's time to have something for myself. It's time to be something for myself.
Speaker 1:
And if you grew up knowing you're different than other people because you've had trauma, because you your life was different, maybe because you grew up with a lot of aces and you maybe have even done some healing in the past around that, well then, that's what we're talking about. That's what we're talking about. And you have this awakening and now it's time to change. So what do you do? Well, this is the part where you learn how to enjoy life. This is the part where you learn how to feel calm and at home in your own skin. This is the part where other people are no longer your jailer, but instead we get to delight and share the parts of our lives with them, the parts that we'd like to share. Doesn't that sound beautiful? Instead of other people being our jailer, we get to enjoy and share our lives with them. It's so worth the work that it takes to get there, and we have to start to see the role we play in our lives. We're not just victims or standards by, but we created this and now we get to learn how to create something new.
Speaker 1:
So this week, the fundamental pillar that we're talking about is answering the question who am I? And when we answer this question, who am I? We're not talking about who am I in relationship to someone else. We're not talking about roles we play. We're talking about ourselves as individuals, and this is one of the biggest keys to healing from complex trauma, because when we answer this question, we learn what boundaries we truly need to feel safe in our bodies and our relationships. So the work of answering who am I is interesting, because I think that it's really important to look at the backstory. Why would we need to answer who am I? Don't? We know who we are already. So when we're talking about this, what we're talking about is unmasking your survival self.
Speaker 1:
So oftentimes, when we experience complex trauma which, of course, means that in order to get our needs met. We have to be a certain person, act a certain way, feel a certain role, and so that kind of necessitates the development of adaptive strategies that are really just keeping us alive in our minds, right. So we create these protective masks, or maybe these personas, these roles, so that we can be who we need to be as we face this harsh reality that we're in of trying to feel safe in our bodies, trying to feel safe in our life, trying to get to the next day without whatever the consequences of our life are. But really, these masks obscure our true selves and because we wear them so often, because we feel these roles so often, we end up with a real, significant disconnect between who we genuinely are, what we genuinely feel, the desires and the beliefs that we have, because we start to adopt other people's ideas, other people's feelings in order to keep peace, in order to keep ourselves safe. So healing really entails like peeling back all of the layers of our survival self and allowing that I guess vulnerability to look at our authentic self and allow that person to shine through. It's never been safe before. So now, here we are, grown people and most of us, you know, in relationships with people who genuinely do care about us, but still it doesn't feel safe.
Speaker 1:
And so we've learned how to do things that, I guess, don't show our genuine selves but really protect ourselves, so that, if you know we are ever in a situation we have hidden who we really are, and that person won't get crushed and by shedding these masks that we have, we uncover hidden aspects of ourselves that we've really hidden since. I mean, when did your trauma start? Were you one, two, three, four, five? When did your aces start? When did life become so stressful that you had to put on mask and become someone else in order to be okay and survive? And so it's been so long, and so we've hidden all these different aspects of ourselves that we may have even forgotten who we really are. And so, ultimately, what we need to do is have self-acceptance and grow and learn about ourselves as individuals.
Speaker 1:
Like, honestly, when I first started doing this work, I remember someone said to me like, if someone said to me what's your favorite flavor rice cream my favorite was vanilla, because it's like you don't have to think about it, it's easy, you're no surprises, just like give me a basic ice cream that I can enjoy and it's not going to cause any fights, because there's not anyone who doesn't like vanilla, and so I mean it's just kind of ridiculous. There was things about me that I don't even know why I thought that or felt that way, until I really started considering how I adopted other people's preferences, I adopted other people's ideas and values, and really, for me, this all started kicking up when I started having my own family, and then I realized that so many of my mom's values were not my values, and so I was having to rectify in my mind how it was okay to reject her values and raise my kids how I wanted to. And that was a really hard reckoning for me, because I just felt like, you know, if I lost the love of my mom, I would not be able to continue. So it is going to take a lot of work to do that because, first of all, our bodies are so trained after however many years we've been alive 20, 30, 40, 50 years to live a certain way and be a certain person, and so now we're going to have to really take our nervous system and teach it that it's okay to be who we truly are. Now I can say that I've been working on this for a while and I can say that the times it's so interesting to me because when, let's say, I'm going to a party with a bunch of friends and I know most of the people there, let's just say I know about 80, 90% of the people there, which is usually the parties I go to, and I get a lot of anxiety around it because of course it's not safe to be myself. Of course that means I'm going to have to put on this role and be this person and you know it's just. I know you guys all know it can be very stressful.
Speaker 1:
But since I've been healing this part of myself and since I've figured out that if I can authentically be present in my body when I go to an event, I have so much fun and I connect with so many people. And you know all those people in your head whether that this is true or not, whether it's just how you feel or not, whether people have slighted you or not all those people in your head who are those negative, scary people. When you go somewhere and you are present in your body and authentically yourself, they don't even phase you, you don't even see them, you don't notice them because you're too busy being authentic and enjoying the people around you, and so I have seen glimpses of that. Before I got this full-time job, when I was living the relaxed life of not having a job, I was able to be that way and do that a lot more. And now that I work full-time, it does take a lot of energy for me to relax enough and to really just feel safe enough and calm enough to be present in my own body and do that. But more and more each and every day, I find that I'm able to do that, that being confident in my own skin, knowing who I am, even when I'm around other people.
Speaker 1:
So each week, as we talk about different pillars, we're going to see how they all tie together, and that's quite normal, because this healing process is kind of like a big circle. Like you heal one thing, that leads you to the other, that leads you to the other and back around to the beginning again, and so answering this question who am I is a great place to start, and we'll really get you observing and noticing you in public settings, with friends, even by yourself, the way that you think about things or the way you choose to do things. So take a look and notice where you are being authentic. Maybe that would be a good goal for this week is to write down, maybe a journal for five minutes about areas in your life where you are authentic and maybe where you'd like to see a little more authenticity, and maybe you can find an activity that is something that means a lot to you and do that this week for a couple of times. I don't know, for me, time alone is rare in this house, so that's something I'd like to see more of and do more of for myself. Helps, helps me feel like myself is a good way to put it and not like a mother or like a wife, but just like myself.
Speaker 1:
All right, well, this is the end of episode one, season three of the Hidden Healing podcast, and it's so good to be back. If you know anyone who could benefit from listening to this, please be sure to share it with them. The best way to grow listenership on podcast is by word of mouth, so that would be really awesome and I appreciate it. If you have any comments or thoughts, anything you'd like to hear more about, I'd be happy to do that. Just reach out on DM on the Hidden Healing podcast on Instagram, or if you reach out to me on Facebook messenger, also be happy to answer your questions. All right, well, you guys have a fantastic week ahead.
