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          Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we&#39;re changing the dialogue around divorce so that no woman ever stays in her marriage out of fear. Get ready to dispel myths, learn life-changing tools, and build a solid foundation in yourself from which to make your decision. And now your host, me, Britta Joe. Welcome back this week. So if you are one of my listeners that has noticed in your journey with considering divorce that you seem to have moments of feeling like you&#39;re up and things are going well and life is manageable and you feel good and the relationship is okay, and like, all right, this is this is life&#39;s good. And then moments where you are really, really down. Moments where you feel overwhelmed, big feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, and like it&#39;s never going to get better. Maybe feeling like you&#39;re a kid again, but this time you&#39;re in an adult body with adult responsibilities and the like crushing, overwhelming dread at that, like holy shit, I am an adult in charge of all these other people and things. And yet I feel absolutely unqualified to do that. Most of all, these cycles that you might be noticing, where there are periods of time where you feel like you are on top of the world. You have it all together. Maybe you are killing it at work, or you know, you&#39;re volunteering at your kids&#39; schools and you feel good and connected. And those are contrasted with these moments where you feel out of control and go into these really deep, dark, emotionally overwhelming places. If this sounds like you, this episode is going to change your life today. Because what you may very well be experiencing is complex post-traumatic stress disorder, also known as CPTSD. And if you listen to this, don&#39;t know what that is, or haven&#39;t already listened to my previous episode on it, I highly recommend potentially pausing this and going and listening to my original episode, episode 11 on CPTSD. Another episode that you may want to consider as well will be episode 60. And that episode, I talk about a concept that is really going to be the heart of this episode, which is this analogy that I have around CPTSD and it being these rooms in our internal psychological house, and how when we have CPTSD emotional flashbacks, we get taken kind of back into these rooms. And sometimes, especially if we don&#39;t know that we have CPTSD and we don&#39;t have tools to manage it, we don&#39;t know how to get out of those rooms. And like being trapped in a nightmarish fun house, y&#39;all, this can be so terrifying and difficult psychologically and can have massive impacts on your day-to-day life, month-to-month life, year-to-year life. So, for those of you that have been listening to the podcast for a while, you all know that learning about my CBTSD, it&#39;s been over a year and a half now, and starting to share it openly with the people that are close to me and intentionally managing it, has by far, out of all of the tools and concepts that I have learned, all of it, y&#39;all, my entire breadth and depth of the knowledge that I have learned in my past, you know, seven years of my journey with therapy and coaching and getting divorced and coming to understand myself better, CPTSD work has been the most life-changing shift for me in this entire journey. I am such a huge proponent of understanding it, if it resonates with you, if you end up seeing it in yourself, learning how to manage it because it is an absolute game changer. So, with that said, let me lay out for y&#39;all what we&#39;re going to cover in this episode. First off, I am going to end up answering two questions that I actually left unanswered in episode 60. So, back in episode 60, I presented two questions that at the time it was so fresh in this new idea I had about the rooms and the way they relate to CPTSD that I was like, hey, at some point in the future, I will come back to this. Well, here we are today. We&#39;re coming back to it. And the first question will be how do we go into these rooms? Okay. And the second will be, how do I work with these parts of myself and heal the pain that is stuck in these rooms? And don&#39;t worry, we&#39;re gonna get dive deeper into what the rooms are. I&#39;m gonna give you a little refresher around that as we um really get into the heart of the episode. After I answer those two questions, we are then going to dive into three of my recent real life examples, which I am so excited to share with you all, because I really, in my opinion, this is some of the most like in-depth material that I&#39;ve ever heard described around what an emotional flashback can look like, feel like. And I&#39;m really going to go in depth with not only how they get triggered, what it feels like going through it, but specifically with each of those examples, I am going to share three tools that I use the most for managing and working through my own emotional flashbacks. I also, as an awesome extra on this episode, when I come to the final tool, which a little surprise peek is going to be EFT tapping. I am actually going to include in the extra show notes that will be available over on my Substack for my paid subscribers. I&#39;m going to include the exact EFT tapping protocol that I created from this flashback that I&#39;m going to be sharing that ChatGPT created for me. That, you know, I can&#39;t take much credit besides telling it, holy shit, I&#39;m losing my mind. Create this up for me. And the reason I&#39;m doing that is because you&#39;ll be able to see how I prompted it. And with that EFT tapping protocol format, you&#39;ll then be able to set up your own tailor-made thread with Chat GPT to be able to use it whenever you need to as well for yourself. With that said, let me dive in first with a little refresher on CPTSD and on this analogy that I have around the rooms. Okay. And to do that, we have to remember a couple of things. First off, trauma from our childhood is real and it does not magically go away just because we become adults. I don&#39;t know about y&#39;all, but nobody, nobody in my family growing up discussed this. This was not understood. This was not talked about. I really grew up thinking, you know, once you become an adult, you just have it all figured out and life goes smoothly because you&#39;ve magically, you know, grown up. You&#39;re no longer a kid. But what I see over and over, just repeatedly, in my own life, in my clients&#39; lives, is that trauma has a real and lasting impact. And we&#39;re not even talking just like capital T trauma, what most people think of like, oh, my parent died, or oh, I was, you know, in my instance, I was molested by my father, like, ah, capital T trauma. No, we&#39;re talking also like lowercase T traumas, the like slow, perpetual drip on a psyche that can come from parents who are emotionally immature, who don&#39;t know how to regulate or show up or be a secure attachment for you. It may not look big and dramatic, but it still has an effect on your psyche. And so much so that this trauma literally becomes programmed into our internal psychology. It is a part of us. Second thing to remember is often our most powerful beliefs can end up being formed through our trauma. Okay. And finally, these beliefs, when they get formed, become rooms in the mansion of our mind. So I want to take you back in episode 60. In that previous episode, I shared this analogy, this new idea that I had kind of come up with of thinking of our internal landscape as a mansion with all of these different wings. And in all of those different wings, there being hundreds of different rooms. And at any point in our daily life, our consciousness can get activated and end up going into various rooms that exist in the mansion of our psyche. Okay. And in that episode, I highly recommend like going back and re-listening to it. Seriously, y&#39;all, it&#39;s like from minute six to if you want to like fast forward minute six to minute 24 of that episode, it will really take you deeper into everything I was kind of explaining around that analogy and give you a just a little deeper dive into that. But where I want to take you from here is okay, so we understand we&#39;ve got this wing in our mind, in our in our mansion, in our mind, perhaps an entire wing that was kind of built out maybe by our religion, or another wing that was built out by our parents. And within each of these, we have all of these different rooms. Now, a key piece that I want you to understand in the way that I think about these rooms is that contrary to where I think a lot of people get confused around CPTSD. And a few of you have even mentioned it when you&#39;re like, what exactly is an emotional flashback? It would be easy to mistake and think that when you&#39;re emotionally flashing back, you&#39;re actually like going into this past room from your childhood, that you&#39;re actually, you know, thinking about the specific experience that happened way back when when that initial belief formed. And although I can do kind of some of that work often with my clients where we do identify the initial creation of that room, what I find happens way more often and very subconscious, like in our daily lives, those of us that have CPTSD, is that these rooms, when they get triggered, it&#39;s not like you&#39;re necessarily traveling to the past in the function of it, as much as you are traveling to the past in your perspective in the moment. So let&#39;s say one of the rooms in your mind palace, mind mansion, is a room that on the door the belief says, I have to do everything on my own. Okay. When in your daily life now, in the present day, something triggers you around that belief, and you end up opening that door and stepping in, it&#39;s not like you&#39;re actually going back to that previous memory. Instead, it&#39;s like as you step through that door, glasses are put on to your face that create a lens, a distortion, a filter that you are now viewing your present-day reality through. So the way I think of it is like when you walk into these rooms, it&#39;s not like you&#39;re walking into your past life. You&#39;re just walking into a different version of your current reality that is shaped by this belief. So now in this room, you&#39;re still living in your everyday life, but you&#39;re not realizing that you are actually in a room wearing glasses, seeing everything through the lens of I have to do everything on my own. And why this is such a big deal is because when you go into that room and you put on those lenses, you can end up experiencing a completely different version of your reality than you were just before the trigger and the CPTSD flashback occurred. And you often don&#39;t realize that you are in this room because what you&#39;re seeing in the room is just your current reality. But in your subconscious, you are seeing it with this different lens of belief that is now coloring everything you see. And when you have this lens on, it can literally change your entire experience of the world around you, so much so that you see the people in it differently. You think of yourself differently. And from all of that, you end up behaving differently and interacting differently. That is how insanely powerful these rooms, you know, the lenses, the lens and the room are kind of the same idea, but I needed you to think of it as a lens so that you understand you&#39;re still viewing your everyday reality. You&#39;re just not realizing that you have this lens on, that you have somehow walked into a room in your mind palace that has a subconscious belief that is now flavoring everything you&#39;re seeing. And as I will illustrate later on in the episode, y&#39;all, and thankfully because most of these examples are so fresh, I will be able to break down in detail what that experience actually feels like. Um, I y&#39;all are getting really lucky. I just had like a lot of massive flashbacks over the last month. And because I am so fascinated by CPTSD and so interested in it, I was able to coming off of them really analyze and understand, excuse me, in a way that I haven&#39;t before what was actually happening there. Okay, so I&#39;m really hoping that that was clear as mud for y&#39;all. For sure, if you guys are like still super confused about the rooms, uh, drop a comment, you know, on this episode, and I will try to do maybe an extra bonus episode where I can wrap my tongue around it a little easier. But hopefully we&#39;ve got the basics down, right? This idea that we have multiple different rooms inside of us formed by our different beliefs. Those beliefs can often, some of them, be rooted in our trauma. And that when you have CPTSD and something triggers you, that trigger can end up leading to you stepping into a room, metaphorically placing on lenses, uh, you know, glasses onto your eyes that have a certain color lens that then you see everything around you through. And that you often don&#39;t know that you are doing this because it&#39;s often very subconscious. But when you do, you then start existing as if you are living in these rooms rather than the rooms of your adult grounded, regulated self. Because CPTSD rooms, emotional flashbacks, they take us back into feelings of hopelessness and helplessness that aren&#39;t actually real and related to our adult self as much as they are what we felt like in childhood or in these past rooms that were built back then. Now I want to dive into the two questions I left unanswered in that previous episode, episode 60. So the first question I had brought up was how do we go into these rooms? Okay. And I&#39;ve already mentioned it a couple of times, right? I&#39;ve said when we get triggered, but I&#39;ve also noticed, I want you to think of it as two different ways. So the first and biggest way is life will activate them for us. Okay. How do we end up going back into these rooms? Life is happening and it activates it for us. That&#39;s what I&#39;m talking about when I talk about triggers. Okay. But the issue with this first one, where it&#39;s just life is activating it for us, is that often when life reactivates these rooms for us, if we don&#39;t know what is happening, we cannot facilitate releasing the past pain. And instead of recognizing, oh, I&#39;m in a CPTSD flashback, we can end up becoming trapped in those rooms. And if this happens enough, okay, if we have enough of these triggers happening, enough of these rooms getting activated without us realizing and being able to down-regulate back into our bodies, back into our adult self, back into the adult brain, we can go into what Pete Walker in his book on CPTSD calls a regression. And y&#39;all, I have watched this happen in myself. I&#39;ve watched it happen in my clients. This is where enough triggers have happened, and you&#39;ve been unable to release and process all of that emotion that is being like when you walk into these rooms, they&#39;re they&#39;re pretty emotional. We haven&#39;t been able to release them, we haven&#39;t been able to downregulate back. Now they&#39;ve been compounding. It&#39;s like they&#39;re just compressing on top of each other over and over and over. And when that goes on for long enough, you can start living months and years in those rooms, in feelings and thoughts and beliefs that are really just leftover hurt and pain from your childhood, from, you know, not even just your childhood, because we definitely have rooms that are created in our marriages, in our teenage years, just anything in your past. You can end up living in that all the time without even realizing it. And honestly, if I think back to like where I lived the majority of my marriage, I would say at least like 85% of the time, I was just in a regression because I didn&#39;t know back then how often I was getting triggered and flashbacked all the time. Now, the second way that we can go into these rooms is by intentionally activating them with people who love us and can support us. And often I want to offer it&#39;s not so much like intentionally activating. What I found found is it gets triggered by life and then it kind of gets suppressed. That&#39;s what we do naturally, because nobody&#39;s taught us how to actually facilitate managing it and processing it. But we can go back into those rooms intentionally with people who love us and can facilitate it. And this is probably a good 50%, if not more. That&#39;s like a conservative estimate for me, of the work I do with my one-on-one clients. Like I am so proud to say that a huge piece of what I teach in my personal coaching is flashback management, is learning how to process and recognize your flashbacks and then be with them and come through them. And I would love to give a quick example for you all of what that looks like when I am holding space and working them through a flashback. So typically in my personal sessions with my clients, we will start off with a thought download at the beginning. And this is just kind of like a brain dump where I get to connect in, I get to see kind of where&#39;s their brain at? What have been some of the big feelings this week? What&#39;s the big feelings right now? And often in this brain dump, I can spot when we&#39;ve got a flashback triggered. I can see it in their body reaction, I can see it in their voice changes, I can see it in any emotion that starts coming up. And when I do, I I often will intentionally slow them down. I will pause them in the recounting of things. I will have them anchor into their body. That&#39;s usually through, you know, directing them into noticing where they&#39;re sitting, noticing how their feet feel on the floor, noticing the way the chair is holding them. I may send down a grounding cord with them, kind of connect them back into something bigger than themselves. I will slow the breath down. That is one of the biggest things. Pete Walker will talk about this. I&#39;ll talk about it a little bit later in his 13 steps for managing flashbacks, but he talks about how when we get flashbacked, our breath gets shallow and rapid. So I will help them slow down their breath. I&#39;ll draw their attention to sensation in the body rather than their thoughts, because their thoughts are what keep re-triggering them. And as I actually, um, and typically I&#39;ll have them close their eyes, which helps them kind of drop in more to their body, as they focus in on their body and their breath, what we notice is their body starts to, from the slowing down, to actually be able to digest the emotion that has gotten released, right? That&#39;s, I mean, that&#39;s the like silver lining of this whole CPTSD emotional flashback piece, is that it opens back up trauma that has gotten tucked away in your body, and it becomes an opportunity to now in a safe space digest it. Now, when we&#39;re doing that digesting, I&#39;m bringing their attention to noticing what&#39;s happening with that sensation in their body. Where is it located? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? I&#39;ve often described this on the podcast as like emotional waves, right? These big waves that come in. That&#39;s what we&#39;re doing. We&#39;re watching the wave as it comes in and it crescendos. And then we&#39;re feeling through it and we&#39;re staying with it at the height of the peak. And then as we continue to just breathe and notice, it will decrescendo. Now, sometimes as it&#39;s decrescendoing, I will reactivate it. I&#39;ll bring back in once they&#39;re a little bit more grounded and feeling back in their body, we&#39;ll reactivate that painful belief I caught earlier, because normally I can see it in their words, in the brain dump, all have caught it. And together now, we&#39;ll watch it come in through their body and then it ebbs out. And we can reactivate it as many times as we need until the sensation is completely processed. Or sometimes I like to think of it as like draining out of them. And wildly enough, this is when that previous thought, whatever that belief was, now feels neutral for them. Like when this is done, well, we can say that belief that previously threw their body into a full-blown flashback, and it no longer activates sensation for them. Um, at this point, I&#39;m looking for their body reconnection returning. I&#39;m looking for regulation. They often feel so much better, like just the relief. All of the fight, flight, freeze, fawn stuff that was going on is now passing. Um, something fun I often see my clients do here is they will end up like yawning. And that is actually a response when our vagus nerve is being activated and stimulated and a sign that they are now down regulating. It&#39;s like one of my favorite things to watch for as soon as they start yawning. I&#39;m like, okay, we&#39;re getting there. And then typically from this point, we&#39;re able to, you know, open once we&#39;re in a neutral space and we&#39;re regulated again. There it is. Now we can open to new beliefs. We are no longer in a flashback. We are like connected and tapped back into our intuition. We&#39;re connected and tapped back into our body, which you guys know is the source of like that is your deepest connection with your soul calls is through your body. And if you guys are listening to this and being like, oh my God, this sounds amazing. Like, yes, I want this. I have to give you guys a little PS that I literally have an episode. Um, it&#39;s part two of episode 24, where I gave you guys all a recorded meditation that takes you through a shortened practice, similar, very, very similar to this. So if you don&#39;t have, if you&#39;re listening to this episode and you&#39;re like, yes, yes, please, if you don&#39;t have that episode bookmarked and a link like straight to it on your phone&#39;s homepage, you may want to consider that, babes. Because I&#39;m realizing like this was not a tool I was gonna mention. I I wasn&#39;t, this is not one of my specific three tools I&#39;m gonna give you, but I&#39;m like, look, there, there&#39;s another tool that y&#39;all can use when you&#39;re in a flashback. Now, what I have learned with my clients and even with myself, y&#39;all, is that until we are through a flashback and really back and kind of more regulated in our bodies, the majority of cognitive coaching and talking will just not make a huge difference or create lasting change. And for those of you that have done a lot of like cognitive behavioral therapy, you may be going, oh shit. Maybe. This is why no matter how much I talk about it, it&#39;s not actually making a difference or changing things for me. Because with my clients, I&#39;ve seen it&#39;s really only when they are reconnected to their body and feeling safe again in it that I can make progress, then again, with their mind. And I am very, very passionate now about taking the time to do that, to process those flashbacks first before we just move into the, you know, all of the thoughts and all of the different things that we can change with coaching. So that is my answer for our first question, right? How do we go into these rooms? Often they get triggered just by life, but also a way that we can do them is once they are triggered, we can go and reactivate them with people that can hold space for us so that we can process and open and release and digest what has been brought up and out of those rooms. Now, the second question I left unanswered in my episode number 60 where I talked about the rooms, was this really big one, which was like, I was like, oh, there&#39;s all these rooms, and you know, you can get stuck in them. And then I was like, and I can&#39;t really tell you how to get out of them just yet. I&#39;ll talk about it in the future. So the second question is, how do I work with these parts of myself? I want to caveat this by saying there is a lot of overlap here with internal family systems work by Richard Swartz. Like, once I got to this part in the episode when I was writing the outline, I was like, oh my God, so much of this, you know, here I just said, how do I work with these parts of myself, right? There&#39;s a whole other way to do this work through parts work. And I&#39;ve mentioned the book before on the podcast, No Bad Parts by Richard Swartz. Also, you know, for those of you that are like, ah, I&#39;m loving this and I want to work with a therapist that can do this. It&#39;s not just going to do cognitive behavioral therapy. You know, I don&#39;t think many therapists are gonna do what I&#39;m describing on here, the way I do CPTSD flashback management. But there are many therapists that are certified in IFS that can help you work with past parts and that will kind of be a framework very similar to this. So definitely flag that in your brain of like, oh, an amazing thing to look for when you&#39;re considering a therapist is whether they are IFS certified knowledgeable in that technique. But for this episode, I am choosing to focus on teaching this through the framework of managing CPTSD instead. So know that you may be like, oh, this sounds a lot like parts work. Yes, there&#39;s a lot of ways that this can be thought of in that way. But for my framework, for the way that I found it most helpful, we&#39;re gonna look at it through the lens of CPTSD. Now, let&#39;s dive in to these three examples that I&#39;ve got y&#39;all, because I&#39;ve given you a lot of, you know, intellectual, educational framework now for this. But where I think things get really juicy is when you can actually see it applied, like actually watching it, understanding it, hearing somebody else&#39;s experience with it. So I&#39;m going to give you three different tools along with each of those three different examples. Um, I&#39;ll give the tool after each one. And you&#39;ll notice in all of these examples, I am going to be talking about flashbacks that happened with Joe and that I processed with Joe. So please understand that you don&#39;t have to have a partner to manage your CPTSD flashbacks. Okay. You do not have to have one. And also, holy shit, is it wonderful to have a partner to do that with you. And so I wanted to do this episode just because these three specific examples were processed in this specific way. I do want to encourage you as you&#39;re listening to them, using that framework of understanding, yes, you can do this on your own, but also maybe being able to play within seeing these experiences between me and Joe. Maybe playing with the possibility of seeing yourself or your spouse reflected in some of these interactions. And know that, you know, another big piece of you transferring, kind of applying your own, like, oh, look, there&#39;s me in that moment, or oh, that&#39;s me, that&#39;s my husband. Like, I see what he&#39;s doing there, or that&#39;s my partner there. I see what they would be doing there. I want you guys to know that for me, looking back on my marriage with my ex-husband, now that I know what CPTSD looks like for me and how it shows up in my life, I can honestly say with certainty, y&#39;all, that probably 95% of our fights and miscommunications were related to unknown and unmanaged CPTSD that was also being like heavily exacerbated by narcissistic coping mechanisms on his end and codependent ones on mine. So being able to sort out when you are in a flashback is gonna be really crucial for all y&#39;all in this journey right now of trying to navigate whether you want to stay or go. And being able to identify that will allow you to do that process with way more personal understanding and compassion. I see so much shame for us as women around this feeling of like feeling crazy, feeling out of control and not understanding what it is. Also, I think there is so much material here for being able to kind of gauge yours and your partner&#39;s responses in comparison to mine and Joe&#39;s. Because, and this is big, y&#39;all. I really do believe that if you have CPTSD, a huge part of your decision of whether you want to stay or not needs to come down to whether your partner can truly be a safe place for you to heal with and manage it with, or whether they are actually a majority source of where the triggers are coming from. So really keep that in mind while I&#39;m discussing this. Okay, so let&#39;s dive into this first example. And I especially love this one and actually the second one as well, because in both of these, you&#39;re really gonna see illustrated what I&#39;d said earlier when I said flashbacks and going into these rooms can literally make you hear things differently, feel things differently, root, and react to things way, way differently than you would if you were not in a flashback. Now, with this first example, on this one, I actually want to kind of off the cuff right now share with you the tool before I give you the example. I&#39;ve realized it&#39;s just gonna be easier that way. Because unlike the other two tools, which will be about managing your emotional flashback in the moment of it happening, this first tool is a proactive one. And it is the tool of educating your close friends and your romantic partner, spouse, husband about your CPTSD ahead of time. So let&#39;s dive into this experience. Okay, here&#39;s the setting, okay? Joe and I hanging out one night on the couch, and I am totally feeling it, y&#39;all. I am horny. I am wanting to be intimate, I am feeling him, hoping he&#39;s feeling me, but noticing that I am feeling like really unable to communicate that, which is not surprising. This is a this is an area for me that&#39;s kind of difficult. Um, and in not communicating it, I&#39;m instead like using more of like my body cues or my sound trying to convey that, like, yeah, I&#39;m into this, let&#39;s keep going. But Joe would start and then he would stop. And this happened quite a few times. And I didn&#39;t realize, and granted, y&#39;all, we&#39;re just kind of like kissing, touching, hanging out, like chilling. It&#39;s not like it it was not like, you know, oh, we&#39;re like having sex and then he&#39;s stopping. Like, no, we&#39;re just kind of hanging out, but I&#39;m like kind of hoping he&#39;ll take it further. And when I&#39;m like kind of hoping he will, he&#39;s like stopping and then like going back to conversating. And um I didn&#39;t actually realize this until after all of this, once I&#39;d like digested and and figured out what was happening. But each time that that was happening, where we would be kind of flirting and fooling around, and then I&#39;d be hoping that it would go further and it wouldn&#39;t, it was actually triggering my childhood trauma that I have around thinking I&#39;m doing something wrong, confusion around what needs to happen next. I mean, this is definitely like deeply interlaced with a trauma around a child, you know, experiencing sexual contact from an adult, and not, you know, the power dynamics there are really, really fucked up. So I was experiencing a lot of like internal without me even realizing it, y&#39;all, confusion and like fear and rejection and all of that is building in my nervous system. Okay. And then I finally get the courage to say what I want after like, I don&#39;t know, y&#39;all, like an hour, a couple of hours of hanging out like this. And I say something that&#39;s like, hey, I want you to do things to me. And he says something like, Yeah, I&#39;m good. Do you want to go to bed? And y&#39;all, I had this massive cascade of internal thoughts and feelings. Like, talk about, you know, I feel really vulnerable asking for this, and then all of a sudden it&#39;s like, oh my God, he said, like, yeah, nah, I&#39;m good. And then wants to go to bed. Like, ooh. So I&#39;m like, yeah, sure. And so as we&#39;re walking to the bedroom, and I&#39;m, you know, starting to get ready for bed in the bathroom, like brushing my teeth. Oh, y&#39;all, I can feel myself spiraling out. Like, I I now I know, like looking back, but at the time I didn&#39;t know. But like my inner and my internal critic is getting really, really loud. It&#39;s like, you should be okay with this. This isn&#39;t a big deal. He should be able to say no. You shouldn&#39;t, you know. And then all this shame, like, oh my God, why do you want this so much more than him? Obviously, you know, there might be something wrong with you. And then the confusion, right? Wait, I thought, does he not like me? Are we not like what? Just a shit storm of confusion, y&#39;all. So that by the time we get in bed, I am in like a full freeze mode, just hoping to fall asleep before I open my mouth and just lose it and say, I don&#39;t know what. And so we climb in bed, and I&#39;m in, you know, I&#39;m just like laying there, like kind of stiff like a board, and he&#39;s being all touchy and affectionate. And as I&#39;m laying there, all of a sudden he&#39;s like, Whoa, like, what&#39;s going on? And out comes me saying, like, well, you know, I asked you if you I kind of mentioned I want you to do stuff to me, and you said you were good. And he&#39;s like, Yeah, I you you asked, you said, you know, I want you to do stuff to me. And I was like, Yeah, I&#39;m good. That&#39;s he&#39;s like, and then I mentioned, like, do you want to go to the bed? Like OMG, y&#39;all. I have never had such an incredibly clear and like holy shit, kind of example moment of what being in a flashback looks like. This, this is it. This is like the gold standard, y&#39;all. And it shocked me when he told me that he had literally said, like, yeah, I&#39;m good. Like, I&#39;m in. Uh, let&#39;s do it. Let&#39;s go to the bedroom. And that I could not hear what he had said. By that point, I realized looking back, I was like, oh my God. I could not hear what he was saying any other way because I was so internally already riled up from all of those triggers that I didn&#39;t even realize were happening. Like, like, let this piece sink in for a moment, y&#39;all. So we both start discussing it, right? Like, I am shocked. I&#39;m like, wait, what? You wanted to? Like, I totally heard you say, yeah, I&#39;m good. Like, like a no, you know? And as we start discussing it, he ends up sharing too. He&#39;s like, you know what? I think I actually was triggered as well. Cause I was like, there were all these moments where like you would stop. Why were you stopping? And he&#39;s like, Oh, actually, I think I was in my own flashback because he has trauma around making advances on, you know, his previous partners and them not wanting him to do so. So he had been kind of in his own head reading some of my body language or, you know, the way I was acting as not wanting me to do those things and backing off. So literally, guys, we&#39;re both in our own flashbacks in this experience where we&#39;re both thinking the other person like doesn&#39;t want to be with us or maybe doesn&#39;t want to do anything, and yet internally we&#39;re both wanting to do something. That is wild. And just to provide like even greater context on that, Joe and I are actually in a relationship where we like each other and communicate a lot. Like, and we could in this instance just be completely missing each other&#39;s signals. Now, what is so important about this whole example and how it ties back in to the first tool I have for you is that Joe and I could connect and even have this whole conversation that came out of it because I proactively established a foundation of CPTSD education and management with Joe when I first met him. So I met Joe like right at the beginning of 2024 and found out about CPTSD maybe a month before that. And I remember telling Quinn when she was coaching me, I was like, I want to date somebody who can help me manage this, someone who will understand it, someone who will love me through. It and who will be there for me in my flashbacks. And I definitely got the opportunity to test that out right away. Um, I don&#39;t know if I&#39;ve shared this yet on the podcast. So if this is a repeat, y&#39;all just come along with me on the second telling of the story. But on our second date, uh, we were at my house and we&#39;d been fooling around and things were going good. And then he kissed me and stuck his tongue a little bit in my mouth. And for some reason, y&#39;all, it just pop. It was like a huge um reaction. And I kind of started freaking out. And as I was freaking out, I think Philly had enough knowledge to be like, oh my God, I think this is a CPTSD flashback. And I was able to, in that moment, y&#39;all, second date with this guy, be like, hey, um, I have this thing called CPTSD from my trauma in childhood, and I think I&#39;m having an emotional flashback right now, and so I just really need to slow down, and I need your help in some ways. And he was just like, Yeah, for sure. Like, what do you need? I&#39;m right here. I can I can do whatever you need. And so from the start with us, me having CPTSD and it, and you know, the beautiful thing about it is that Joe also has CPTSD. And so together it has become a foundation in our relationship of working through flashbacks. I prefer to work through them much more, you know, intentionally with the tools that I have. Um, but even just having him have the awareness of his own flashbacks and be able to notice them when they&#39;re happening is huge. So that is my first tool for you is understanding and proactively discussing this with your close friends, with your romantic partner, with your spouse, with your significant other. This is what allows for you in the moment to have the kind of discussions like we had where you get to realize, okay, we&#39;ve got flashbacks going on here. And for me and Joe, coming back to that night, what was so awesome about that is, you know, once we realized what had happened, like I&#39;m pretty sure if I remember, I cried, right? Because I was like, God damn it, I really wanted to have sex tonight. And totally like was gonna get it. And then I freaked out in my head and thought that he was saying he&#39;s good and didn&#39;t want it, but he was saying I&#39;m good and he&#39;s up for it. Oh my God, right? And he held me. And I know we laughed because eventually at one point I&#39;m like, oh my God, this is just too, this is just too crazy. And along with that, we were able to see, like, whoa, okay, me not asking for what I want, and him just trying to read my cues. That is a real recipe for disaster for us. Like, based off of our trauma and the triggers that we both identified, right? Like, I have major triggers around a partner starting to kind of advance things and then backing off and me not understanding why. He has a big trigger around trying things and feeling not sure if his partner&#39;s enjoying it or not. So once we were like, okay, that then we got to step into the adulthood piece of like now that we know this about ourselves, we are not going to just keep doing this to each other. Um, and we were able to actually come up with a plan. It was super cute. I was like, well, we just need to like practice role-playing then, being people who actually ask for what they want. As you know, for both of us, it&#39;s like really vulnerable and uncomfortable. It&#39;s not something we&#39;re used to. I know that we&#39;ve gotten by for a long time now on our relationship with just like being able to kind of into it and energetically pick it up from each other. But in this instance, that was not the case. Um, and because we came up with that, it was really cute, like the very next day in a super cute and sexy way. I was like, okay, so like let&#39;s do some role-playing. Tell me what you want me to do. And he did, and we had like some of the best sex we&#39;ve had. So when you have this foundation of both people understanding their CPTSD at play, this is then what moments like this can become. You know, this is what managing your CPTSD with a partner who not only gets it, but loves you and is like, yeah, I want to work through this with you. It is such a game changer, y&#39;all. Okay, so first example down. Now let&#39;s move on to our second one. And in this example, I really want to illuminate even further. Like that first one hopefully gave you a good, like how kind of example of how much once you&#39;re kind of triggered and in a room or you&#39;ve got this lens on right, how it can completely change your live reality. Just wait until you get this next one, y&#39;all. So, as a lot of people, a lot of my members in my community will know because I was kind of sharing with them as I was going through it while I was in the community. Probably like two to three weeks ago, um, there was a Sunday where Joe and I, you know, I&#39;d been working for a lot of it, and I told him I really wanted to like Marie Kondo our closet. This is something that I recently have told him. Um, I was like, I want to marie kondo the whole house within six months. And I just, I mean, this is an episode for another time, y&#39;all, but like clearing out shit really shifts things for me big time. And I&#39;ve been wanting some big shifts this year. So I was like, okay, it&#39;s time to clear out shit. So I&#39;d really been wanting to marie condo the closet with him. And get done a little bit later in the day. I come out and I&#39;m like, let&#39;s do this. And he&#39;s like, Yep, I&#39;m in. So we&#39;re doing it. We are pulling out everything from this closet. And I&#39;m having a great time. Um, I mean, where Joe and I were at really at that point, like relationship-wise, life-wise, I am currently feeling super connected, feeling very, very safe in my life. Like I had just earlier that week before that Sunday, at my son&#39;s soccer practice, like pulled up to pick him up, and I&#39;m like standing there watching just like waves of gratitude and like holy shit, this is my life rolling over me as I&#39;m thinking of how you know Joe&#39;s bringing my other two boys to meet us at the pizza place, and we&#39;re all gonna hang out together. Like, I was so happy and in love with my life. Pinna pinnacle moment, y&#39;all. So prior to that Sunday, Joe had covered one shift earlier that week for his old work. So he doesn&#39;t work there anymore, but they&#39;d called in, they needed somebody to cover a shift for him, and he&#39;d gone in. And I had noticed feeling a little bit off about that, and we&#39;d even talked about it not being really that great for him. So I had kind of in my head this expectation that, you know, if he was going to be working this next week, if they needed him, like it would probably be maybe like two days max, right? So Sunday night, right as we are calling it quits, in the middle of the entire closet being pulled out. Like there are giant piles of clothes everywhere. Um, we finally were just like, whoa, it&#39;s Sunday night. We need to go to bed, kids need to go to bed, like we will have to finish this later. And I&#39;m feeling okay about it because I&#39;m like, we&#39;ve got tomorrow, you know? And so I&#39;m like, it&#39;s okay, like we can finish it tomorrow. And he&#39;s like, oh no, I&#39;m working. And I felt the shock hit me immediately. And I&#39;m like, what? And he&#39;s like, Yeah, I uh sent you a text with my schedule. They just sent it through. I&#39;m gonna be working four days this next week in a row. Oh, y&#39;all. Once again, the feeling in my body of the like shock uh start to spiral. I can feel the impact. I am immediately noticing, like I get real quiet. I&#39;m kind of like, ooh, fear, confusion, starting to feel unsafe. I start to internally freak out a little bit. And of course, because that was never safe in childhood, I&#39;m starting to kind of like, ooh, like really internally manage. And thank goodness for our summer camp this year in the community, because thanks to all those tools I learned with the nonviolent communication that we did, I was able to use my nonviolent communication structure of like observation, how I&#39;m feeling, what I&#39;m needing, make a request to express the pieces that were coming up for me. Right. And one of the biggest ones was like, whoa, if I had known you were gonna be working this way next week, I would not have chosen to Marie Kondo the closet. Like now we&#39;re gonna go straight from a torn-up closet into like you being gone for four days. I was devastated, y&#39;all. It was, it was a it was a big, big flashback for me. But we managed to talk through it and, you know, for me to understand he was coming from a place of like, these are, you know, people that I care about. They need my help. Um, and it&#39;s a way for me to, you know, make some extra money. Um, we&#39;ve talked about this since then that he like really had no idea that this was gonna have this kind of effect on me. He really thought I might be happy that he&#39;d be out of the house. Little does he know how much I love having him here. Um so we come through it the best we can, and I&#39;m just kind of like, okay, you know, I understand his perspective. I think I&#39;m gonna be okay. And the week starts. Day one, I felt okay, but that was because I was using massive, like hyper productivity, overfunctioning coping mechanisms to survive. Like I literally marie kondoed the rest of my stuff from that closet, packed all of it up in three boxes that I mailed to my assistant. Cause I was like, here are all these gorgeous clothes that I am no longer fitting in, but I still love. Because y&#39;all, I&#39;ve put on some gorgeous weight, like I&#39;ve been wanting to for like two years now with my personal trainer. Um, and I was like, go, go, go, go, go. I was freaking crushing that day. Day two though, I&#39;m starting to struggle. Like my body, I&#39;m not realizing it. My my body, though, is in perpetual dysregulation. And I honestly think now, y&#39;all, part of why this was so hard is because I don&#39;t live in a flashback dysregulated state anymore. Like, very rarely am I living from day to day to day in that flat one of the flashbacked rooms. Okay. Um, for the most part, a good, I mean, goodness, it&#39;s probably a good 70% 75% of my life is spent in a more regulated, like feeling good in the rooms of my creation and the realities I want to live in life. Okay. So by day two, I am really starting to struggle and I am just not recognizing that I am in like perpetual dysregulation. I&#39;m starting to get really short with people. I noticed myself being really angry, dropping off my kids at school that morning. Like, and with this, I&#39;m starting to get kind of frantic because there&#39;s these thoughts of like, why am I so crazy? Why am I like this? Why am I because this is not my normal, you know? So it&#39;s starting to feel like, ah, what&#39;s wrong with me? Um, also that day, like Joe is unconsciously, like, we don&#39;t realize we&#39;re doing this, but he&#39;s also like starting to react with some of his coping mechanisms. So he was kind of acting like very like trying to comfort me and like communicating more and trying to hold me like above and beyond what he normally does. Y&#39;all, it was just not working like it typically does. Where normally when he puts his arms around me or he connects with me, it allows me to drop in. My body was shut down to him. Like, uh, it was almost like painful. Like he&#39;s hugging me, but I&#39;m not able to calm down. He&#39;s trying to connect with me, but I can like barely make eye contact with him. And it&#39;s so confusing when you&#39;re in the middle of this because you&#39;re like, why am I losing my shit? Like, it makes sense logically. He he this is a way for him to make a little bit more money, and this is a way for him to, you know, help out people at his old work. Like, I should be okay with this. But the reality is, what&#39;s showing up in my body is I am really, really not. And by day three, it was rough, y&#39;all. I was noticing moments of like big internal anger at him, like not wanting to be around him. I could tell myself intellectually, like, what is going on? Like this, this anger, this reaction does not match his behavior. And yet it was like I couldn&#39;t control it. Um, I was not acting it out, but I was definitely feeling it inside. And that&#39;s even in some ways, like, extra scary because you&#39;re like, oh my God, what is happening inside of me? Um, and I was on top of that, like compounding a lot of shame that I was struggling so much, just really feeling feeling like, what is wrong with me? Why can&#39;t I get this together? I&#39;m starting to feel really scared. Like, whoa, this must mean something really awful that I depend on this person so much. Like, ah, like I don&#39;t know. It just, it was, it was one of the most intense days I&#39;ve had was that third day of him working. And by the time he got home, y&#39;all, I had the closest I&#39;ve ever come to a panic attack once he got home. Um, where I just like could not stop spiraling. And thank goodness he saw what was happening and he was like, let&#39;s go for a walk. And he got me outside in nature, and that was where I was kind of able to like, okay, and kind of express to him a little bit like, I am not doing well. This is really not going well. I don&#39;t know what&#39;s happening, but I am struggling. So day four comes around, and it was better because, you know, the night before, I had at least been honest. I had tried to communicate and express how much I was struggling and what I was going through. Now, by that point, the kids go with their dad, and I&#39;m thinking, okay, we just got to get to the weekend. Like we&#39;ll have the whole weekend together and we&#39;ll be able to drop in like we normally do, and things will get back to normal. But y&#39;all, that weekend, it was, it was almost like in its own way, some ways kind of worse because now we have no distractions from the kids or him being at work. And I&#39;m starting to notice that now I&#39;m like, I&#39;m not feeling really sexual chemistry towards him, and I&#39;m not feeling drawn towards him. And I&#39;m really starting to feel avoidant. I&#39;m noticing I can&#39;t sit still. I&#39;m not able to be present or just be in my body. I am needing to clean and be moving all the time. Like, talk about needing the coping mechanisms. Um, our conversations became very surface level. And it was once again, like a lot of it was me feeling like growing frustration that obviously I have become so connected to this person that my mental health can suffer without him. Ugh, that just like brought about a lot of shame. And at one point, um, you know, I ask with some trepidation, oh, and this is because so previously, the third night um where I had had almost the panic attack, I had told him, like, hey, next week I need you to not work more than two days. I just cannot have you working more than two days. Two days feels like the amount that I can do right now. I really need you to tell your boss you can only do two days. So come Saturday or Sunday, I asked him with some trepidation if he told his boss he could only do two days. And he replies that he had asked him to try. And I got reactivated. I was like, ah, and thank goodness, once again, thank goodness we have a foundation of being, you know, as open and honest as we can with each other in these moments, because I then went even deeper into just being like, hey, um, you know, things are not, things are getting worse, right? Um I was noticing that at this point we were like kind of coexisting and feeling like roommates, which y&#39;all, is this not crazy how quickly this can spiral in like a week? Whoa. Um, and you know, by this point, he&#39;s also triggered from having to go to work back in this environment that was tough for him. He&#39;s now starting to get into his own flashbacks too, and he&#39;s pulling away in his own coping mechanisms. Like, we are in a, is that like a death spiral? I don&#39;t know, but things are not going well. And thankfully that night, I just started telling him honestly that I was like, I am really nervous about what&#39;s happening because I am noticing in myself I&#39;m starting to feel this desire to run away from you, to disconnect, to escape. I&#39;m getting this really intense fear in my body that it&#39;s not safe and that I need to get away. And I realize now, you know, this is an awful feeling that ultimately like resides kind of in my disorganized attachment from my childhood, but also really has a trigger and a trauma from my marriage, my previous marriage, where being with someone felt worse than honestly being single because it was so painful to feel the disconnection with the person right next to me. And as I share that, he then also shares that, like, yeah, I&#39;m also feeling really triggered. And like, if I don&#39;t do everything perfect, then you know, you&#39;re gonna abandon me. And as we kind of, it was like I could see both of us kind of like just walking out into the swamp together, like trying to find a way to reach across and find one another in the middle of it. And as we&#39;re discussing back and forth, at one point I went into like a full-blown, disorganized attachment flashback reaction, where um I really think now this is probably like very common, as I was saying earlier in people with severe childhood trauma, but I&#39;d never seen myself feel it or experience it so clearly before. And it was like I lost my shit. Thankfully, he was, we were on the couch, he was holding me, and I just gutturally like screamed and cried and allowed this like really terrifyingly horrible feeling of wanting to get away of feeling like being close to him, being close to anybody isn&#39;t safe. Which, if you guys know my story, this makes perfect sense, right? Um, and as he held me close, I let out the pain that was getting triggered, I now realize, and needing to be released, right? This is the flashback. There&#39;s the pain from my childhood, there&#39;s the pain of loving people that were also abusing me. And that&#39;s what the heart of disorganized attachment is you feel this like really intense desire to be close to people and simultaneously this horrifying fear that they will hurt you. And as we came through that, you know, I he just was like, he saw it, he got it. And he was like, I will make sure that I only have two days next week. And I really needed that, y&#39;all. At that point, I think this had just become a huge, there&#39;s a whole bunch of other factors that tie into it, right? And that um, you know, this was not work that he needed to be taking right now financially. Like it just, and in my brain, it wasn&#39;t making sense because it was like, this matters so much to me. Why are you needing to do this at the expense of me? And where in the past, you know, I look back and I&#39;m like, this was a huge, huge trigger in my previous marriage because I often would advocate for like, I miss you, I&#39;m struggling, I need more time with you. And because of my ex husband&#39;s work and being an investment banker, he was not around. And that got reinforced over and over with me saying, like, this is not working, and it never turns. Changing. So also another huge trigger on me like needing to be able to say, like, I need you and him show up for me. Now, on top of all of this, y&#39;all, if this isn&#39;t enough of a trigger, all of this coming off of this weekend, right, culminates in my middle son coming home with a wet cast on Monday night from falling in the pool at his dad&#39;s house. And as any of you have who have had children with broken arms and casts, like that is the one thing you cannot do is get it wet. And so I once again, like Tuesday, kind of went into a hyper-functioning mode. I had to change my schedule and, you know, call them, get him in and replace. Like he woke up. It smelled horrific. It was so bad. Take him in, get it off, get it put back on. That&#39;s, you know, driving all the way down to the Dallas, coming all the way back. And as I&#39;m driving back from all of that, like, wow, I&#39;ve done it, right? I&#39;ve done all the things. I&#39;ve got it all taken care of. Y&#39;all, like driving the car, I just noticed this huge, psychologically crushing wave of overwhelm and dread and hating myself come in. And there it was, this suicidal ideation right there. This thought that like everyone would be better off without me here. And I was like, holy fuck. That I mean, that is that is the kind of flashback that brings you to your knees because you&#39;re like, whoa, we went from doing okay a week and a half ago, two weeks, to oh my God, like really, really, really we&#39;re back here. How are we back here? Kind of feeling. And this is what I really want to emphasize for so many of you all. I really think that if a flashback is big enough and continues in the way it was for me, as I&#39;m seeing from this experience, that you can go from like, life is great, life is the best it&#39;s ever been. I&#39;m so in love with it, to just a massive spiral down. And along with that, what I saw in myself is that over that week and a half, I literally was feeling and behaving like someone I don&#39;t regularly know myself to be anymore. That&#39;s how much that triggered room and existing in that reality was changing. I mean, y&#39;all, the way I was thinking and feeling about Joe, the way I was thinking and feeling about myself, all drastically different than how I had been just a week and a half earlier. Thankfully, though, y&#39;all, I have a relationship and a partner that listens and he heard my feelings. So when I brought up again earlier that weekend that I needed him to only work two days, which I just want to also point out, y&#39;all, was like really, I just want to make sure you all know that that was really fucking hard for me to do. Because for someone like me that feels like I have my shit together and I can function really, really well, that&#39;s a super vulnerable thing to be like, I need you, even just saying I need you is so vulnerable. Um, but he did. He fucking listened, he made sure. And so this next week, he only ended up working two days, which was Tuesday and Wednesday. So Tuesday, he&#39;s at work and I&#39;m doing all of the cast stuff. And also one of the things that was really helpful was that then on um Wednesday morning, I thankfully had my coach help me identify what was going on. And she was able to, like, I was giving her the whole thought dump, like brain dump of the last week and a half, like basically giving you guys everything that I&#39;ve just given you. And she was able to spot that there was this belief that had gotten triggered the night that he told me about the work that was like, I can&#39;t trust anybody. Don&#39;t ask me why that&#39;s specific, like, why is that specific? I&#39;d have to go into like a whole bunch of other psychology around me for you to understand. But that was the belief that got triggered. And from there, I spiraled out into all those other adjoining rooms, right? Rooms that were like, oh my God, this life that Joe and I have built together before this, like he&#39;s been at home these last couple months, and it has honestly been like the best two months of my life and his as well. So other rooms that were like, you can&#39;t have this. This won&#39;t last. This is going to go away. Um, a room that was like, maybe he doesn&#39;t want this, maybe he doesn&#39;t want to be around me, maybe he doesn&#39;t like this. It was just like my brain went into that initial room and then all week long was just opening up the other connecting rooms and on and on and on until I was deep in this maze of interconnected rooms from all of the flashbacks. Now, Wednesday comes, right? I figure out, oh, I am in, I am in a room. I know up until that point, like I knew I was flashbacked, but I didn&#39;t know what the room was specifically. And on that same day, he goes to work and actually ends up having a severe enough of a trigger at work that he tells them he&#39;s not going back. Cause side note, y&#39;all, the reason he left that job in the first place is because of how triggering it was for his CPTSD. And Pete Walker, who I&#39;m going to talk about because I&#39;m about to tell you guys my second tool. I&#39;ve already talked about him in the episode previously, but he emphasizes that once you know who the people, places, and activities are that are triggering for your CPTSD, you want to avoid them. So it was also a good moment for him of going back to this job and being like, yeah, no, that&#39;s why I left in the first place. So on that Wednesday, he&#39;s like, I&#39;m not going back, I&#39;m done. And finally, y&#39;all, finally, we were done with the ongoing sequence of triggers. But all of those rooms that had gotten reopened and all of that pain that came back up with those rooms being opened from beliefs like I can&#39;t trust anyone and the life we want isn&#39;t what we&#39;re gonna get to have, that now needed to be processed. And here is where my second tool, Pete Walker&#39;s 13 steps for managing emotional flashbacks, came in. So that first day that Joe was finally back in home without the prospect of him leaving again, that morning I had a rush of emotion come up. And I knew it was like, yep, this is the flashback, this is the processing. And at this point in our relationship, not that we were like this in the beginning, but at this point in our relationship, I have become comfortable enough with Joe that sometimes um when I&#39;m feeling like I want that, I will ask him to come hold me while I read through those 13 steps. And so I was like, baby, I&#39;m flashbacked. I need you. And we went and we climbed up in the bed, wrapped me up in a blanket, and he held me close from behind while I just read through the list slowly. And as I was reading the list, like big emotions would come up and I would just let it out. And I sobbed and I screamed, and really from a like, you know, although I was able to do a little bit of that that week before, this time I was doing it from a more like grounded and secure place, right? On that previous week, it was kind of like we were both flashbacked, but now we had a little bit more grounding. And by the time we reached the end of the 13 steps, my body was back open. And I wept with how I could finally feel myself and him again. And it&#39;s like that initial trigger on that Sunday night, it was like that belief had put a giant wall encasing my heart and cut off my energy from him. And up until that, we live a life, a relationship that is very energetically open and safe with each other. So we really feel each other a lot throughout the day when we&#39;re with each other. And oh my gosh, when that opened back up and I my brain clicked with like, oh wow, that&#39;s what this felt like before the flashback. Over the week and a half to two weeks that we were in the massive flashback, I was completely closed off. As, you know, he couldn&#39;t film me either. We both in that moment expressed how we were not going to live like this again. Like it was such a huge reminder and clear delineator for me of like, oh, this is what I felt like in my previous marriage. And same for him. This is what both of us had felt like in our previous marriages. This level of closed off, not feeling safe. We&#39;re, yes, we&#39;re together, but we&#39;re not actually together. We&#39;re not actually connected to each other. And we were both able, you know, what&#39;s beautiful is we both ended up as we were previously, but you know, coming through these two weeks, I wasn&#39;t sure if we were or not. But we both were like, no, like it is excruciatingly painful and destructive to live with each other in that way. And we knew clearly what we want, which is we want to do whatever it takes to find a way to have the reality that we&#39;ve had these last two months, which is where he&#39;s at home and I&#39;m working from home, and we get to spend every single day with each other, weaving in and out of each other&#39;s lives. And it really clarified that for us in a way that we just had not understood before. And then, of course, over the rest of the week, y&#39;all, as he was now home and regulating back in, and as I was, you know, we naturally reconnected and we came back into our grounded, non-flashbacked, connected to ourselves and to each other reality. And that is the reality I am in right now, y&#39;all. And holy shit, has the last week been so much better living in that reality. And I want to really emphasize this because until you understand or have gone through something like this, you don&#39;t fully get this concept of how much you can live in different rooms, how much your reality can stay on the surface completely the same. That&#39;s what I&#39;m saying, y&#39;all. For the most part, mine and Joe&#39;s reality over those two weeks, the only thing that changed was that he was going to work. But otherwise, we&#39;re still partnered, we&#39;re he&#39;s still living with me, we&#39;re still doing all the things we normally would do. But because that change triggered the flashback, it did, that reality for the next two weeks felt completely different. It was a whole different world. And once we figured out what that was, worked through those flashbacks and came back into our grounded selves, it was like, okay, this is the life we want. And thank goodness, you know, once again, one of the gifts of the the flashbacks, the silver lining is I was able to process things. I had a partner that could be there and be safe for me. I was also able to be there for him and safe, and that I&#39;m I&#39;m honest with him. I tell him the truth. He knows where I&#39;m at, he knows what I&#39;m thinking and feeling, even if it&#39;s hard when we go through it together. But as we came out the other side and he showed up for me with me saying, This is what I need, and he delivered that trust strengthened that relationship even deeper than it was before the whole experience and us much clearer on what we both want and the life that we want together and what we need for that, right? Before this, we&#39;d kind of been playing around with the thought of like him going back to work, you know, somewhere else. And now we&#39;re like, nope, you need to find a job or you can work from home. That is a non-negotiable. Okay, y&#39;all. So my third and final example, let&#39;s dive into this one. So I know the trigger on this one. Um, this is the one that I&#39;m gonna have the beautiful EFT tapping resource for y&#39;all on. But the trigger on this one was that this was actually during that two weeks period uh with Joe and me, where we were, you know, definitely both still flashbacked. And honestly, I think it was that weekend, it might have been on like the Saturday, okay? I knew that I needed to chill and resource that day, but I was still feeling really dysregulated. And it&#39;s really difficult to get yourself to chill and just like be present when you are severely flashbacked. And so what did I do instead? I did coping mechanisms. I didn&#39;t even really understand, right? That&#39;s the thing, is when you&#39;re in flashbacks, it&#39;s so hard to kind of track what&#39;s happening. But ultimately, looking back, I just I did a coping mechan mechanism that day, which was like working. And that&#39;s also, I just want to normalize. Like, that is totally okay too, y&#39;all. Like in the moment, that was what I needed. I needed to be busy, I needed to be working, I needed my brain focused on something other than what was going on between me and Joe. And I often feel great when I get work done. I get to feel like, okay, I&#39;m a good person. I can do stuff, I can put stuff out in the world, right? So I&#39;d gotten all this beautiful work done. And yet once I finished, my brain immediately went to guilt that I&#39;d spent the whole day working, but not dropping into my body and helping it down regulate. Which, y&#39;all, looking back, is how I know that I was using that work, not necessarily in an aligned like flow state of regulation, but as a coping mechanism. Because afterwards, there was like guilt because the escaping of those negative feelings all of a sudden, once you&#39;re done with it, is still there. So I knew how much I&#39;d been struggling to feel safe in my body and like things were okay. And I felt guilt at the end of like, uh, I really didn&#39;t do that. I still haven&#39;t resourced or dropped into my body. So we needed to get food. So we&#39;re out driving to get food, and I&#39;m feeling flooded. I am not really able to coherently decide what I want to eat. That&#39;s another thing that happens when I&#39;m flashbacked. I really struggle picking food. I was feeling very like busy energy in my body, very anxious feelings. And so Joe&#39;s like, it&#39;s okay, we&#39;ll just start driving. And we throw out an idea of a certain restaurant, we end up going all the way to it, and right as we get there, it starts pouring down rain. And I suddenly like did not want to go in. And that really ratchets up the flashback feeling, y&#39;all. Because in that moment, I&#39;ve said I was gonna go do something. I&#39;m already feeling ashamed that I don&#39;t really know what I need right now. And now I&#39;m faced with having to tell someone I love, hey, I don&#39;t actually want to do this anymore. I&#39;m feeling really overwhelmed. And in the past, especially with partners that I didn&#39;t feel safe with, and you know, I mean, Joe&#39;s the only person I&#39;ve ever known about CBTSD and established that with him before. So with other partners, I would just suppress that. I would shove that down and I would overfunction and go in to just make them comfortable, and I would just hide my distress and pretend. But instead, because this is Joe, I asked if we could slow down. And I started crying some. And I was able to articulate because of our first tool, right? A foundation of CPTSD management in our relationship, that I just did not want to go into this restaurant. Like I was not feeling it, there was nothing I wanted to eat there, and I would just be kind of forcing myself. And he was like, Okay, not a problem. And he starts driving again. And I went from like feeling relief to instantly interpreting a tone in his voice as frustrated or disappointed in me. Once again, I showed up and I spoke aloud in Brene Brown&#39;s technique, where I said, the story I&#39;m telling myself is this, you know, and the story was the story I&#39;m telling myself is that you&#39;re upset that I didn&#39;t want to stay at that first restaurant, and you&#39;re wishing um, you know, we had just stayed and you had been able to eat because you&#39;re probably really hungry. And he was like, No, that&#39;s not actually what I&#39;m feeling. I&#39;m just feeling worried now, like about I can&#39;t even remember what it was, but it was something other, it was like related, but it wasn&#39;t exactly that. Maybe something about like, um, you know, what place might still be open or where we need to go. It was more logistical than it was like disappointment in me. So we end up deciding we&#39;re gonna go to five guys. And once we get there, I&#39;m like, can you go in? I am going to stay in the car. And what am I gonna do, y&#39;all? Our third and final tool in EFT tapping sequence. Now, although I have known about EFT tapping for quite a while, this is the biggest and most recent gem that a member in my stay or go community recently turned me onto, and that is making a huge impact in my life. Um, she kept bringing it up on multiple calls, and I was like, this is sounding really freaking awesome. And I tried it once before this experience that I&#39;m telling you now, and I was like, whoa, that really works. This one is the one that sold me on it. So what I did is I&#39;m sitting in the car, he goes in, I just pulled up Chat GPT, and I just really shortly dropped in what was happening, which is like, hey, I am feeling really kind of overwhelmed and a lot of guilt because I worked all day when I should probably have been resourcing my body and blah, blah, blah. Can you give me a protocol? And y&#39;all, as I started doing that EFT tapping protocol, honestly, y&#39;all, this was probably the first time that week that I&#39;d finally felt some kind of let down into my body. And it was huge. I cried so much just with the setup phrases. So the way EFT tapping works, there&#39;s like setup phrases at the very beginning, and just those alone, repeating each one of those three times, had me like releasing so much. And I know that&#39;s because it was like all of this pressure had been building inside of me all week, with the inner critic inside of me, just like judging and shaming, like, what&#39;s wrong with you? What&#39;s wrong with you? I had felt so out of control and spiraling. But with those initial um setup phrases, it was like I was finally allowing acknowledgement of what was, but in a safe space and in a kind way. And I just remember the letdown being immense. Like, y&#39;all, imagine like your brain being, you know, squeezed in tight fists, and then all of a sudden those fists releasing and like, you know, the spinal fluid finally like going out into the rest of your system. And I was like, oh my God, this tool is massive. It is everything because up until that point, everything else I&#39;d been trying that week, y&#39;all. The flashback was just so b big. Like in this instance, even the 13 steps at that time. Remember, I shared the 13 steps, but that was only afterwards. The 13 steps on my own was just not cutting it when we were in the middle of it. And I think of it now, now that I&#39;ve experienced this, it&#39;s almost like my nervous system was frozen. Like a computer, you know, when they freeze up. And the EFT tapping was a restart button. It was like I was rebooting the computer. The whole system just needed to be reset. That is how amazing EFT tapping seems to be for kind of restarting your brain when you are short-circuited on too many flashbacks, too big of flashbacks, and not able to get out of it. So, because of that, and of course, because I would love for all of you to start using this tool like yesterday, I am including that extra that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode in the show notes for my amazing. Beautiful Substack readers, all of you. And it&#39;s gonna be just, I&#39;m just gonna copy and paste the exact note I dropped in with the chat. So you&#39;ll be able to see the first little note that I did, which will give you a good idea of like what I tell chat, how I phrase it, and then the full EFT tapping protocol I got back. And what I want you guys to do with this is you can up, you can open up a new conversation with your chat and you can feed it this EFT protocol. You can say, hey, this is an EFT tapping protocol. I want you to remember and use for me going forward. You know, in the future, when I&#39;m struggling with something, I&#39;m just gonna tell you what it is, and then I want you to create it up from this. And then when you are in a moment of feeling like, I am losing my mind right now. I think I might be in a really big flashback. All you have to do is go to that thread, pop in and say, Hey, chat, this is what&#39;s happening for me. This is what I&#39;m feeling. Can you create up that EFT tapping protocol for me? Boom, there it is, specifically made for what you&#39;re experiencing in that moment. Such a big game changer for real. And it&#39;s like something with this tapping. I mean, especially with the way it allows you to just acknowledge what is without shaming or changing it. I swear that is the magic. It really just does something for your brain, especially for your CPTSD parts, your inner critic parts. It helps all of that just chill out a little bit. Um, something else I wanted to tip you guys off to as well is that we will put in the show notes Pete Walker&#39;s 13 steps as well for super easy reference for you guys to get back to. All right, y&#39;all. So we have made it through all three of the examples, all three of the tools. I want to close this episode out by kind of pulling all of this together for y&#39;all. So, why did I do an entire second episode all about CPTSD and teaching you these tools? Because I think this matters massively. And especially if you&#39;re standing in the place of asking yourself whether to stay or go. Because if you don&#39;t understand that what you are experiencing are flashbacks, and if you don&#39;t, once you know what it is, know how to bring yourself back into your body and regulate, then so many of the fights and conversations in your marriage, y&#39;all, they&#39;re not really about what&#39;s happening in the present. They are two dysregulated nervous systems freaking out at each other. I think I&#39;ve mentioned it in the podcast before that it&#39;s like both you and your spouse are running around in a dark room with knives. Like that is chaotic. It is terrifying, and nobody is actually able to see the other person or themselves clearly. That is why understanding these tools matters so much for you, my listeners, specifically, because it&#39;s going to hopefully give you a framework to recognize as you&#39;re going through your daily life, like when you notice that shock, that activation, feeling like, whoa, okay, this isn&#39;t just about my partner leaving dishes in the sink. This is maybe about something much bigger. Like, what is the room I might be stepping into? What is the old story that my body is going back to? And with that awareness, y&#39;all, I mean, awareness is just like such a huge, like key piece of it. What and your awareness will build. By the way, I&#39;m so much better now than I was just a year ago in noticing when I&#39;m in a flashback. But with that awareness, you can then regulate yourself back. You can process the flashback and you can return to the present moment. And that is where the magic is. That is where you can actually have connection, intimacy, and clarity. But, and this is a super important part, I really want you to understand that this is a two-part process, y&#39;all. Okay. Yes, managing your CPTSD, understanding you have it and managing it is crucial. But if in that process you start to see that your partner is unwilling or unable to manage their own potential CPTSD and their nervous system to admit their trauma or to actively work on understanding your triggers and not being one of them, then this is not about you just getting better at regulating so you can tolerate a painful relationship. Let that land, y&#39;all. Pete Walker really, in his book, I feel makes clear that you don&#39;t heal from CPTSD, you manage it. It is not something that goes away. And one of the most important parts of managing it is knowing the people, places, and activities that are so triggering that you just need to avoid them. So that&#39;s a pretty big deal, y&#39;all. If you are walking your own journey through considering divorce, I really want you to keep this in mind. This is not about becoming so healed and managing your CBTSD so much that nothing bothers you. Like, no, y&#39;all, you&#39;re gonna get triggered. Joe in fact said that to me the other day. He&#39;s like, How are we gonna think of ourselves? We are two people that come from very, you know, traumatic childhoods and both have CBTSD that get triggered, and yet we are here loving and supporting each other through it. Like, we are not in a fantasy that this will not be something that is a part of our lives always. It&#39;s the gift from our parents that just keeps giving. This is about you learning how to recognize flashbacks, regulate your body, and along with that, choose environments and relationships that support your wholeness. That, y&#39;all, that two-part process, both of those, is where your clarity about whether to stay or go is going to come from. Another big truth I want to leave you all with at the end of this episode is that CPTSD is not who you are. It is the result of what happened to you. And managing it is absolutely possible. I really believe that the more we name it, we share it, and we learn to regulate through it, the less power those old rooms will have over us. Seen it in my own life. I am like living proof of that. So hopefully, one of the biggest things you take as well from today&#39;s episode is that you are not broken, babe. You are not too much in all these highs and lows that you may have been thinking, like, ah, what&#39;s wrong with me? Like, you are not alone. And every single time you choose to meet yourself in the middle of a flashback with compassion, with tools, with safe connection, you are literally rewiring your brain and rewriting your future. And that is immensely sacred and courageous work. Ah, y&#39;all. This episode, I knew, I knew when I started it, I knew it was gonna be one of my favorites, and I&#39;m very, very proud of it. I hope that this will land for so many of you. Of course, I would be delighted, like over the moon, excited, to hear back from all of you in the comments with how this starts working for you. I&#39;m really interested in gathering more data on the EFT tapping, what you&#39;re noticing with that. Um, I&#39;d love to hear if you&#39;ve tried the 13 Steps Pete Walker&#39;s tool, and how you&#39;re feeling about educating your partners and best friends around CPTSD and asking them to help you in it. Um, also, a tiny heads up. Don&#39;t hold me to this, but there may be an extra kind of short but yummy bonus episode dropping later this week. I haven&#39;t recorded it yet, but I&#39;m definitely feeling it. Um, if I&#39;m feeling spicy enough for all of you, because I have just such incredible paid Substack subscribers, all of you. And I had one other massive flashback that came up this past week that I really wanted to share in this episode. But as you guys can see from how long this episode already is, that was just not going to happen. So I am considering um dropping that a little bit later as a bonus episode this week. Um, because there&#39;s a lot of good things in there as well. As always, please remember, babes, that I have got you. I have got plenty of amazing resources to help you above and beyond the podcast, starting with my incredible stay or go community. I am so freaking excited. In less than a month now, I will be, it&#39;s gonna be the first weekend in October. I will be at my first uh stay or go retreat for the community, uh just super amazing. Well, we had a community member in the community offer to plan and create it up for us. We&#39;ve got a ton of women. I think there&#39;s at least 13, maybe 14 women coming. Two of those are flying in from the UK to be there. These are women that I have deeply, just deeply and passionately fallen in love with over this last year. I mean, like we&#39;re almost coming up on one year in the community, y&#39;all, October. Ah, I&#39;m so excited. Um, I mean, how cool is that that one year from the community&#39;s inception or close to it, I&#39;m gonna be getting to meet and meet in person over, you know, 13 women that I would not have known throughout this community. And not only am I meeting them, but like I know them. I have come to know them through the community. I&#39;ve coached them in community, I&#39;ve seen them in the chat, on the live calls, and now I get to meet them in person. And I&#39;m really freaking excited for this weekend that we all get to spend together. Truly an incredible gift. And something that I&#39;ve realized, you know, at least for now, um retreats in the future will probably be pulled exclusively from women that are in the community because it is, you know, comforting and nourishing for me to know that I am meeting women that I have a deep connection with and already established experiences with. So if that is something you are like, oh my God, that sounds so fucking exciting and amazing and wonderful, I would love to do that in the future. Join the community now. Get in. Um, I can&#39;t guarantee that we will do a retreat in the future. We&#39;re just gonna see how this first one goes. But I do know that if we do in the future, it will come from the women in the community. That&#39;s who we&#39;ll open it up to. And even if you&#39;re like, uh, not so much on the retreat, we have an incredible workshop this week, our orgasmic alchemy workshop that I&#39;m gonna be teaching. This is the first time I&#39;ve ever taught this technique. It&#39;s a very like personal one that I created for myself that I&#39;ve always been super excited to share one day. And I&#39;m gonna be sharing it in the community this week on our workshop. So that&#39;s gonna be really spicy and fun. Everybody in the community is very excited for that one. I also, of course, offer my 90-minute get unstuck and empowered sessions for those of you wanting that personal coaching with me, right? Not just, okay, here&#39;s the broad brush strokes, but let&#39;s get into the fine details of your specific situation. And as well, my beautiful deep dive package for those that are wanting to work with me exclusively one-on-one. I&#39;ve got a one-on-one client right now who just started with me a few weeks ago. And this week she told me how incredibly meant to be it has felt that I&#39;ve come into her life at this time. And I really couldn&#39;t agree more. Um, I just have seen so much synchronicity in the way that we were connected. And I can say unequivocally that having me by your side while you make this decision of whether to stay or go is life-changing in the best of ways. So until next time, my loves, please be gentle with yourselves, with your body, with your heart. And remember that you are not your rooms, and you can develop the skills to be able to step out of those rooms and back into your grounded, whole, connected selves. Sending you lots of love, my babes, next week.
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