The Case For Maintaining Stigma and Judgement of BPD Behavior Cluster B individuals all deny obvious realities as part of their mind games. In BPD in particular, this takes the shape of insisting that things happened in a way that they feel justifies their intense emotions and abusive temper tantrums. These are not unconscious acts, …
BPD – My Feelings ARE the Facts Read More »
We hear of the domestic violence victim who stays or keeps going back to their abuser. And until we understand coercive control, we will keep asking, Why can’t they just leave? We are asking the wrong question. The victim is free to leave at any time in the physical sense. But coercive control is psychological …
Coercive Control is the Reason They Can’t “Just Leave” Read More »
Hyper-vigilance is a fear-based state of scanning for threats even in non-threatening situations. We tend to think of threats as the life-threatening kind. However, there are also the sort of threats that won’t hurt us physically and that’s why we often overlook these. We also tend to scan for threats to our emotional, mental, and …
Hyper-Vigilance: The Over-Guarding of the Self Read More »
Setting boundaries and holding firm to them is the greatest challenge in our Complex-PTSD community. That’s because our self-abandonment programming tends to run our life. Until we do the healing work, of course. You see, behind our programming is toxic shame. And so, when attempting to assert, it tends to trigger a shame spiral, or …
Setting Boundaries and Holding Your Position Read More »
True story time. In 2014, I shared my dirty little secret with my therapist. “I don’t like helping people.” Yes, I – who considers myself a servant to my Complex-PTSD community and gets much satisfaction from doing so – once said and fully believed my own words. That’s how severe my self-abandonment programming once was. …
Self-Abandonment: People Pleasing versus Helping People Read More »
Forgiving someone for a mistake is beautiful. It shows acknowledgement that we all make mistakes and we can relate to it in some way. However, a lifetime of intentional cruelty is not a mistake. If we cannot imagine treating others the way that someone treated us, forgiveness tends to feel like the F-word. The truth …
Toxic Forgiveness Stagnates the Healing Read More »
Sometimes thoughts get stuck in our heads and then we can’t think of anything else. We know this as ruminating, and it happens to everyone. But in complex trauma, it’s amplified. Not only does it happen more frequently, but the emotional overwhelm keeps us stuck there longer. That’s why ours is called looping in Trauma …
Looping: It’s Ruminating on Steroids Read More »
Repeated exposure to threats teaches us to be hyper-vigilant. When we have no control of these situations, they teach us that there is nothing we can do about it. In other words, learned helplessness. Our experiences teach us how we view ourselves and our outer world. And as par for the course, how much space …
Learned Helplessness: It’s the Fear of Thriving Read More »
Catastrophizing is what I refer to as False Prophet Syndrome. We imagine the worst case scenario and then it feels like a foregone conclusion. We lean into this prophecy, and give it our full attention. How could we not? There’s a threat up ahead! We see it so clearly in our mind’s eye. Terror grips …
Catastrophizing: Negotiating With Your False Prophet Read More »
Negative noticing is a type of cognitive distortion. Like its name implies, it means we are overly noticing the negative. This leads to problems that keep us stuck in the same hamster wheel of negative beliefs. Because when we only notice the negative, we will keep “confirming” and “re-confirming” them. Think “sensory filters” because that’s …
Negative Noticing and the Power of Our Sensory Filters Read More »
