Navigating the Healing Journey: Confronting Complex Trauma Through Routine, Reflection, and Community Support

Wrestling with complex PTSD following a motorcycle accident, I've found solace and strength in the simple, everyday routines. I've experienced a remarkable shift in my coping mechanism, embracing self-care habits like dressing up, exercising, and maintaining a cleaner home. I've managed to break the cycle of binge-watching TV and neglecting my daily routines. Tune in, as I unravel the process of retraining the nervous system to foster safety and reduce triggers.

Could walking down memory lane serve as a healing path? A casual stroll to a local coffee shop sparked a wave of nostalgia that connected me with my husband in a unique way. We reminisce about the simpler days of childhood and discuss the challenging complexities of childhood trauma. Join us as we explore how one can find beauty in the past and how connecting with others who share similar experiences can catalyze healing.

Finally, we delve into the transformative power of acknowledging personal growth. I share about the benefits of journaling as a tool for emotional processing and reflection. It's time to drop the weight of shame and guilt that tags along with past trauma. I'm here, ready to lend an ear whenever you need someone to listen. Let’s lean on the strength of community support, and together, navigate this beautiful yet complex journey towards healing.

The book I refer to is:
Taking A Break For Dummies by Katrina McGee 
https://a.co/d/eDQJzp0

Join Our FREE Online Community.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/healingherchildhood/

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.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

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. Glad you joined me today.

Speaker 1: 0:57

Today's podcast is kind of off the cuff. It's Sunday night it's the night that I normally would record my podcast, and I find myself in a house alone, so it's a perfect time. One of the issues with this podcast is that it's really hard to find a quiet time when I'm able to do the recording, and so it's nice to surprisingly find myself in a position alone and able to record. So in today's podcast I wanted to talk a little bit about kind of like a new epiphany I've had about myself and my life. And you know, after the accident with the motorcycle it's been this is seven weeks, so next week, at the end of the next week, will be two months since the accident happened. And it's kind of interesting because I find myself in the nervous system state of freeze where I can't seem to get a lot done and I have a lot going on that I want to get done and it seems like nothing's getting done. So I find myself asking, like, is this the freeze Fight, flight, freezer fawn, or is this like sometimes we go into like a nesting healing mode where we contract and really spend a lot of time with ourselves? But I think it's mostly being in the freeze state because I don't feel like I have a lot of growth going on and I haven't been able to do a lot of the, you know, mindful, attentive healing that I would like to do for my nervous system.

Speaker 1: 2:44

And so after the accident there was a lot of stress in my body and I did get to cry. As I mentioned last week, there was a couple of times that I really cried it out and last Sunday I was able to cry it out with a friend all the stress that I feel like I'm holding, and so it's really good, but not really doing the deep work myself. And so I'm trying to look at my situation, trying to see okay, so maybe you're frozen what are the good things that are happening, what are the what's different than in the past, when you would have these things? So, first off, let's start with how I know when my body, how do I know when my body, my nervous system and mind and whole self is just shut down and not able to move forward. And so in the past, when I would shut down, I would not be able to do a lot.

Speaker 1: 3:45

I would have to have an incident a lot of times, like the sneezing and the runny nose or something like that. That would just exhaust me and, you know, lay me out, or else I would be with a sinus headache, which I know that sometimes if this is a new thought to you, it's going to sound crazy, but my sinus headaches have been always very emotional. Some people get emotional migraines, some people have fibromyalgia, all of those type of things that are like you can't put your finger on it and say, oh, this is what I have, I have cancer or I have, you know, I don't know what other things are, but you know the kind of illnesses that you cannot describe, a lot of times that are tied in with emotion, and so for me I would have to have one of those events to lay me out, or else and usually that was the case and then I'd find myself Watching just loads of TV, binge watching things, episodes, and being able to count in hours how much time I have spent watching television and Not doing the cooking, not doing the cleaning and all of those things. So I think I mentioned it last time and I I do have I Didn't make and it was largely for myself A crisis planner. So what happens when I find find myself in crisis, when I find myself and, and really you know deep, dark hole, and how do I get out of that, and so I have really studied this for myself, what it looks like so that I cannot find myself in a place like that, and so I'm able to see okay, you, you usually have an illness, you usually watch a lot of television, you usually stop cooking and cleaning, you usually don't take a shower for three days. You know all of these type of things one another one is brushing the teeth. Instead of brushing your teeth twice a day morning and night you brush your teeth once a day, or you skip a day of brushing your teeth, so I'm able to see these things that I do. Now here is the journey to healing, and, and One of the differences that I'm noticing this time around for myself is that I'm brushing my teeth, I'm getting dressed every day, I'm showing up for a job where I work 40 hours a week, and I'm showing up to work every day.

Speaker 1: 6:27

My house is staying cleaner, which is kind of a group effort, not just on me. That's another difference. The house is staying cleaner and I'm not going around yelling at everyone, but instead people are chipping in. I'm still.

Speaker 1: 6:42

This week I started back to exercising. Since the accident with my son, I have not exercised at all. In fact, I want to say maybe I've had a few days with a thousand steps, but since my job is sitting at a desk Answering phones, I don't get up and move a lot. So this past week I exercised three times. I went to the gym twice and walked out doors one time, and so moving my body. That is different, and so there is a lot of differences, but I still find that I'm not doing the forward thinking you know, doing my coaching or course making and Some other side gig endeavors. I'm not doing those things and I'm not Very socially active. So there's a lot of differences that I'm seeing in myself this time and the hole doesn't feel as dark or as deep. So all of those things are good.

Speaker 1: 7:43

I Can count in hours how much TV I've watched. So in the past, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if I watch, like During a deep depression, dark, deep, dark depression, if I watch like five or six hours of TV in one day, and now I can say I'm watching probably tops ten hours Um television this week, and so in the past couple weeks, so it's not quite as bad. I'm more of a podcast listener. I do a lot of podcasts, a lot of like Bible videos, things like that, and so this past, since I've been feeling kind of depressed, I've been doing a lot more of just like Netflix or things like that. So yeah, I am noticing a lot of differences, noticing a lot of good things, and so trying to dig myself out of this little hole that I'm in, and so what I've noticed is that it helps when I count the good that I do. So I have a calendar hanging on the wall and I write my work schedule on it so the family knows what that is. And I took some time this past couple of days to write down the good things that I did so that I can see them and see you're not completely frozen. Yes, you slow down, yes, you're not doing as much as you were, but you're still not completely frozen. So that feels really good to me. That gives me hope that you know I'm not back where I was in the past with my depression or anything like that, and it's nice to see the huge difference.

Speaker 1: 9:26

So one of the days that I walked, my husband and I are trying to intentionally spend more time together and one of the things that we do is we walk. He's a coal miner, so I mean he clocks in miles a day walking, and I mean like on a small day he probably walks five miles a day and on a really heavy work night he'll walk, you know, twice that and carrying 100-pound parts and tools and stuff for the stuff he has to repair. So walking a mile to him is no big deal. So on Saturday we decided to walk over to our local coffee shop and we walked over there and spent some time together and, like always happens every time we spend time walking together, we talk and it really helps us because we seem like if we're driving, if we're walking, we seem to really talk smoothly and well and not be offended by what each other says and be really focused, more in sync and in tune with each other than when we're having conversations in the house and feeling really stressed about everything. So it's always a blessing when we do that.

Speaker 1: 10:46

But we were walking and I walked a route that I had not walked before and it was by a school that had a chain link fence up and it was interesting because it was kind of like a little flashback and I started describing to him, when I was, the house that I was born at Not I wasn't born at a house, I was born at a hospital, but where I lived, growing up for the first six years of my life, I believe, and definitely when I started school kindergarten, first grade, second grade we lived in a cul-de-sac and it was kind of like in a corner. So there was like maybe like four houses and then I think most of them were like touching on sides but each person owned their own, and then there was like three on the. It was like an elf kind of. But on the far side there was my uncle. Lived there and with his girlfriend, and I always said they were her kids. But as I started thinking about it, my mom didn't call him my uncle, even though he was my dad's brother, and she didn't call the kids my cousin, and so I always assumed they weren't. But I believe they're still together to this day. So I kind of think they are my cousins.

Speaker 1: 12:11

But you know just the past, my mom's abusive relationship with my dad, so maybe that's why I think that was the case. But anyways, right next to their house, their property was this chain link fence and I would, when we were little, we would just jump up, we could walk, yeah, we could walk to the opening where they had the gate, but we would just jump over the fence especially if we relate to school and we would just jump the fence and that was the school property right there We'd be on, like the basketball courts, and then we would just walk, you know, 200 feet into the doors. But it brought up so many memories that I hadn't had in a long time or hadn't thought about and so it was just really interesting. And so I was like you know something? And I just started talking about it and I said something that's interesting is that my mom used to make us go to school when we were little and we were scheduled and stuff, and she was really depressed at that time. My mom had a lot of depression, just really her whole life. And I said but some reason, when we moved to Sacramento we weren't, we weren't at school, we missed all the school and stuff. And so you know sometimes your memories when you're a child, especially when you're raised with a lot of child adverse childhood experiences, a lot of stress, the memories are just not accurate or right. But that's kind of what I was thinking, that's kind of what I remembered. Never remember getting trouble for attendance or anything like that until until I was older, until we actually moved north, and I started thinking about it and then I was like, oh, that makes sense. I said the reason my mom had to get us to school when we moved is because, or the reason she didn't have to get us to school when we moved is in between living there and going to school and then Getting our own place up north.

Speaker 1: 14:09

There was a time period for several months where we lived with my grandmother, and my grandmother is kind of like a disciplinarian Well, she's not a disciplinarian to all of the kids, but anyways, to my mom's kid she was. To the rest of my cousin she was not, but to us she was. And so this is Sacramento summertime. You know, 90 degrees is a normal day. We get heat waves up to 120, maybe 117, maybe I'm exaggerating. Anyways, it's been a long time since I lived there and so my grandma she's the one who wanted us to move to Sacramento, and so we stayed with her for several months.

Speaker 1: 14:47

Well, my mom was getting on her feet and collecting the money for down payment and on and on, and my grandma, literally we would wake up and since it was summer, we would wake up and we would get to eat a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table, and then we would be put in the garage and we had a little block-and-white TV. That was probably like I don't know, the little block-and-white TVs. There were more square, but I'm gonna say that the screen that we watched is probably like maybe 14, 15 inches and and, and we had that little block-and-white TV and then we had a little area we could sit in, but it was full of, like you know, she had a pool table in there because my grandma used to have really swanky kind of parties with all her friends and stuff. And so we had a little area where we could, like, sit and watch the television, and she had some game, board games and stuff out there and that was our day. We like literally that was how we spent it. And then at dinnertime we could come in and my grandma would make us, after dinner, go take showers and get in our pajamas and then we could watch TV with the adults for one hour and then we were sent to bed.

Speaker 1: 15:59

So I realized that between the time that I was in second grade and then the time that I started third grade, I Learned how to not be seen. I learned how to be quiet instead of trouble, because trouble meant that my grandma would, you know, fight with my mom, or that my mom would cry, or all these things. And so we learned how to be invisible. And so when my mom got into her own place, we already knew the trick of being invisible, so that she wouldn't make us go to school or anything like that. And so she did of course think that school was important, so she did try it first, but then, you know, we would fight her and then, as long as we stayed out of her hair, she would let us stay home a lot. But it kind of like broke me down into tears a little bit while I was it describing this to my husband, and this realization was kind of rolling out as I was talking about it, because Really I had already learned how to not be seen because there was so much trouble in the neighborhood we lived in. And my mom taught us that, you know we had to keep our noses clean, stay out of trouble, be quiet, because you know we we Didn't want to cause any trouble and you know we lived in a really not great neighborhood and so we understood and took that serious. And then there were multiple times we had break-ins in our home when we were home and different things that happened that were, like you know, semi-violent offenses in front of us, and so we learned how to be quiet for that purpose. And then we learned how to be quiet so that my Grandma, my mom, wouldn't fight or so that my grandma wouldn't be verbally or physically abusive to us.

Speaker 1: 17:40

And and here I am trying to do something public, like make a podcast during this really stressful time in my life, and I find myself afraid to be seen again, and so I think that's one of the struggles with having Listening to a podcast with the host, who's healing from complex PTSD, is that I find myself Irregular. I can't tell you how grateful I am, though, for times like that, when I'm, when I'm walking or or doing something, and the memory comes up like a core memory comes up, and it's so important because it was a huge Defining moment in my life that gave me a meaning that this is, this is the whole, the whole crops of what happens with people who are raised with a lot of childhood Experiences. We have our adolescent brain trying to make sense of things that are going on in our life, and and our adolescent brain is not mature enough to understand and we don't have people Around us that are talking about the things that are going on, and so we end up with meanings that served us when we were young, and it served me to be quiet. It served me not to have my grandma berate me or not to have my grandma get violent, which she was even towards my mom. As a young adult, my grandma would become very violent, and so you know it did serve me. But now, as a grown woman who's 50 years old, it no longer serves me to try to make myself invisible. In fact, what I crave is connection with people. What I crave is Having individuals be able to see me and to be able to see other people, and so having that connection is so important for me so that no longer serves me, and I'm glad that came up because it allows me To take some time to journal about it, to talk to you about it, to talk to my husband about it, to get these feelings out and create a new meaning around what it means to be seen and how now it is safe for me to be seen. I think that that is what the healing looks like when you're healing from complex trauma because we can't, you know there's like capital T trauma that hopefully by now we've all dealt with. You know, because you know as soon as you have the knowledge that you need to deal with that, if you haven't already. Take some time and and deal with that.

Speaker 1: 20:18

But then we have all these other little T traumas, like seeing my grandma become physically abusive to my mom or my cousin. One of my cousins, because she was my grandma, was the kind of person who plays favoritisms and is just sugary, sweet to one person and then hateful towards another. But my grandma also had her own weird demons and so, even though one of my cousins was her precious prized possession and she, you know, raised most of my cousins, at least for several years for each of them, even though he was her prized possession, she would do Emotionally abusive and physically abusive things to him that we couldn't save him from, you know, and and Because I was a child. That's why, like, I have to remind myself of that. See, this is how, this is how my child, mine, I'm older than my cousin and I keep her like why didn't I do something? Yeah, because I was a child. So this is how this stuff comes up, this is how we process it. This is the work that is so hard and it's always so important to To do this work.

Speaker 1: 21:31

But what I find is that it's important to have other people who have shared experiences or can talk about, even if it's a little different, something that they've gone through, because it makes you feel connected and normal. It makes you know that, hey, you're not the only one you know. It makes you feel like, hey, if they can do it, I can do it too. In fact, I have a friend who I've met, an acquaintance that I met online and in a group that she was doing a speech in, and then I did get to have a couple of social gatherings online with her and she in fact just wrote a book and For dummies, that selling on Amazon currently I believe it's about like taking a sabbatical. I'll have to double-check that, but I'll include that in the in the show notes, hopefully.

Speaker 1: 22:19

But I Reached out to her and because she was home here in Australia for a break to see her family and she she has her own business. She's probably 20 years younger than me, but I'm just so inspired by her because of all the successful things that she's done and she had a really hard situation growing up and so I see her like doing healing and helping other people do kinds of healing work and it's just. It just inspires me. So I reached out to her and said, hey, if you get bored, let me know, because I would love to have lunch. You know, because just to like rub shoulders with people who are doing things that are Helping other people, inspiring other people, and that they had to rise themself up to do those things. They had to grow and change and learn to do those things and see that, to me, is community that we all need and and that's why I have this podcast, and I Look forward to the future when I can create that kind of community where we can all get together and you know, a lot of my friends are virtual and a lot of the some of the communities I belong to not a lot, but some of them are virtual and it just gives me a lot of healing and a lot of other people around like me who are on the same path to the becoming emotionally healthy and Healing from complex drama.

Speaker 1: 23:52

So Just want you to think about that and I wonder if everyone who is listening to this has a method of doing the same kind of work looking at the same kind of things in life that come up and being able to sit down and journal about them and do that kind of thing, and also how important it is to look at how much we've grown, how things are different. Even little things that are different, like the depression that I'm in right now is not as deep and dark as it would have been even a year ago, and that, to me, is exciting. That to me, is very exciting. So I think that's all I got for today and I don't really intend for this to be like a diary or like a personal vlog. Follow me.

Speaker 1: 24:50

But also it's so important to see what other people are doing so you can know that you're normal and know that the path that you're on is okay and that there are other people like you, because we got to get rid of the shame associated around having grown up that way and maybe having like triggers in our life that keep us kind of limited sometimes, or having emotional things kind of trigger illnesses in us and all of that stuff. Because, like, if you look around, there's a lot of a lot more people like us than there are not like us, and so it's just, it's okay and we I really believe that if we heal together as a community, we'll each lift each other up more and more instead of, you know, hiding in shame. So that's what I'm about.

Speaker 1: 25:44

I appreciate you showing up for this podcast, even though right now it is a little sporadic. I absolutely love this podcast and I don't want to give up on it. So here I am and hopefully I would be back in two weeks and make another episode Again. I appreciate you and you're always please always, reach out. If you have any questions or any messages or just need to be seen and heard, I'm happy to be there for you.