Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we'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. Hello, hello, y'all. We are back this week. It is just me and Jake chilling at the house. And I am refreshed. I just got back from spending two and a half, three days down in Dallas in Deep Elm with a guy that I am dating for his birthday. And it was absolute magic. For those of you that have never visited Dallas, I love that city. It's so beautiful. And I just keep finding all these parts of it that I've never explored before, that I want to see, that I want to know more about. And Deep Elm is one of those places. I really haven't spent a lot of time down there. We had an Airbnb, and one of the days we went down and we did a little bit of thrift shopping together, which I absolutely adored. I've never done that in general, but I've never, definitely never done it with someone that I'm dating. And I have to say I am a huge fan. We got some really, really cute pieces. So as you all know from the last episode, where we've been headed, what we're working towards is this episode where I get to talk with you guys about complex PTSD, which has been absolutely, as a, you know, as you see in the title, one of the biggest gifts that I gave myself this year, which thankfully, as I mentioned earlier, was it all came from this book, this book called Complex PTSD from Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker. Highly, highly recommend. If anything in this episode resonates with you, go get this book. I had a client of mine recommend it a while ago, and thankfully I picked it back up at the beginning of this year. And it just hit differently. I was finally, you know how some books, when you first start reading them, you're just not ready to hear it. And then later on you start reading it again, and you're like, oh, there it is. Yep. So I was ready to hear it this time around. And I want to jump in by saying why I feel so passionate right now about sharing this is because I notice in myself, and I especially notice in my clients at times moments where we just cannot seem to make the changes. Like we understand intellectually what we want, especially with my clients when they're considering divorce. I'll watch them know they don't want to stay. They're ready to, I actually wouldn't even say they're ready to go, but there's a part of them that is like really ready to go. And there is just this other part that is blocking them. Or more in my instance at this point, I can usually make the changes I want to make. But at times I will come back around to these underlying feelings of self-hatred, overwhelm, depression, and dread. And when those show back up, it can feel very disorienting because it's like, whoa, whoa, I have done a ton of personal work. Like, surely we should be over this. Surely we've done enough healing to not reach these levels and these depths of despair. And later on in the episode, I'm going to tell you what's happening with that. Like how, even though I've done, I mean, in my journey now, probably been about seven years into this journey that has been filled with so many modalities and so many aspects of healing. And yet, I still have these moments. So, why is that? We're going to talk about it today. I want to start by just baseline, you know, what is complex PTSD? And I'm going to be pulling a lot of this episode specifically from this book. I've got a couple of sections I'm going to read, but to start off with, Pete Walker says CBTSD is a more severe form of post-traumatic stress disorder. And it's delineated by these five common features. So the first one is emotional flashbacks, then toxic shame, self-abandonment, vicious inner critic, and social anxiety. If as I listed those, you're like, check, check, oh, check. You are in great company. Welcome. Welcome. Because I resonate with all of those. So even though he goes in depth on each of these, I want to focus specifically. The two that have been the most aha, super impactful for me are the first two, the emotional flashbacks and the toxic shame. So I'm going to talk about those. Not that they are like more important than the others. They're just what I have gotten the most relief out of working with. And definitely, you know, if you have these other pieces, they feel bigger to you. Like I said, go get the book, read up on it. So he says emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions to the overwhelming feeling states of being an abused/slash abandoned child. These feeling states can include overwhelming fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief, and depression. There's a triggering of our flight, our fight, flight instincts, along with hyper-arousal of the sympathetic nervous system. Okay. Once you realize that this is happening to you, I swear, guys, it is one of the most life-changing things. Because prior to knowing that such a thing as an emotional flashback existed, I did not realize how often these are happening for me. So since being able to identify what one of them is, which by the way, that only happened for me just recently. I would say the very first emotional flashback that I actually identified as this is an emotional flashback, was one that I had at Thanksgiving. The cool thing about it is I didn't, I was not able to identify it in the moment. I hadn't started really reading this book until weeks later. And really, it was from this flashback happening and actually the disillusion of this relationship that I was pursuing with this individual. I really felt like because of that flashback, it didn't move forward. And my like diving deeper into that afterwards, like why? What happened there that led me ultimately to reading the book? What happened was I had this really intense flashback at Thanksgiving. And it was something really, really small that had triggered it that felt really big to me. Really big feelings of disconnection and abandonment. And at the time, because I didn't catch the initial flashback and know what it was, I didn't address it with my partner. I just kept going throughout the evening. And what I didn't realize at that time is you get an emotional flashback triggered, and then you can start having toxic shame and self-abandonment mix in. And then you get into this cycle where they're all running and it's working you up and working you up and working you up until later on in the evening. So after you know, we'd gone through this whole evening together, by the end of the evening, I am pretty worked up inside and not really knowing what to do other than being brave enough to like try and talk about it. Unfortunately, by that point, you're so worked up that for me and him, the conversation was it was really tough for me. I felt so disconnected. I didn't realize that at the time, but I was having really strong feelings of abandonment coming up. In the book, Pete Walker will talk about how you can feel so completely disoriented that you can hardly speak, respond, or even think. And I remember going through that with him. Just my mind felt completely paralyzed. And this is insanely disorienting, y'all. When you go from being this, like earlier in the day, I'd been this competent, brave, sexy, like fully embodied woman. I'd had some like incredible self-growth experiences, was showing up like fully myself in the world. So to go from that to that evening with him, feeling like I was in this utter childlike dependency and fear, it just really fucking sucks. And it's so disorienting and really, really overwhelming. And actually, as I'm talking about this, I'm remembering how like we actually had throughout dating this amazing, you know, wonderful human. I really, I love him deeply. Um, and we're still friends, but I definitely had like two other emotional flashbacks with him during our period of dating that I can't even imagine what they would have been like if I had known about this concept and been able to use it. But as it was, I just had to go through that experience like scrambling inside, dealing with absolute, you know, my nervous system being completely fried and overwhelmed. And because I didn't know what it was or how to manage it, I couldn't really help myself in that moment. I came through the best I could, but I didn't know how to calm and de-escalate my nervous system. And later on, I will speak about what I do now that I understand what's happening and how I manage them. But that was just to kind of give you a feeling, an idea of what the emotional flashbacks are like. And I'm hoping that for those of you that probably have a complex PTSD as well, this might shine a light onto like, oh my God, I think these are happening to me too. Because if they are, this is gonna help a lot, a lot, y'all. Okay, so the second one I want to talk about is toxic shame. And he says, Toxic shame obliterates a survivor's self-esteem with an overwhelming sense that she is loathsome, ugly, stupid, or fatally flawed. Overwhelming disdain is typically a flashback to the way she felt when suffering the contempt and visual skewing of her traumatizing parent. So this is such, I love when he ties it back into what it felt like when you were experiencing contempt from your traumatizing parent. Because I can remember an instance when I was, I was already married at this time, and we'd all sat down, me and my siblings and our parents, we were considering going to Hawaii at the time, and I had some reservations and was trying to voice those in this setting, and my mom was so angry at me for talking, for bringing this up. And I just remember the way she was sitting across the room staring at me, and how all it took was that look of absolute hatred and contempt to completely annihilate myself, my sense of self. And um, where in and actually crazy enough, in that instance, I had done enough therapy that I like addressed it in front of everybody. Like I called her out and was like, Why are you looking at me like that? Why are you treating me this way? To which she, of course, pretended like she wasn't, and that was also super disorienting. But that's the feeling when you go into toxic shame, it is just this something is wrong with me. I am horrible, I am broken, I am messed up. I often experience it as a deep, like, oh my God, you're so naive, you're so stupid, why would you think that? And he says also when you're stranded in a flashback, the toxic shame can devolve into this intensely painful alienation of the he calls it alienation of the abandonment melange, which is this trifecta of shame, fear, and depression. And I think really, I'm gonna talk about it a little bit later. I think this is what he is talking about in the book when he talks about when you go into a full-blown regression, which is where you've got these multiple layers of shame, fear, depression all wearing you down. And another key piece I want to mention with this that I thought was really helpful is he says, when you're in the toxic shame, it inhibits you from seeking comfort and support. And this is why so many of us isolate and surrender to the feelings of helplessness rather than reaching out and asking for help. And I know I do this when I am in that moment. If we go back to that moment with that partner I was dating, when you feel completely overwhelmed, unable to communicate, and you're just like drowning in feelings of abandonment and overwhelm, it is so painful to be seen by another person in that moment. You're like, oh my God, just let me disappear. Please, especially, and I don't know if how many of you have experienced this, but especially when you are in the presence of a partner who is not losing their shit, who is not emotionally flashbacked and is very like calm and keeping it together, it almost can make it feel worse because you're like scrambling and trying to explain stuff to them and they're just like removed from the situation. I remember in in my marriage, this was a real source of conflict because I look back now and I realize like I was getting emotionally flashbacked, and your your fight-flight responses are activated. So sometimes instead of me just like shutting down and getting quiet or backing off, really towards the end, I would go into more of a fight response, which was to get loud, to try and explain myself, and then would get shamed for seeming angry or for speaking loudly, and that just like compounds the whole cycle. Because it's really difficult in that moment to like what I really probably needed, and I've realized now is I have to stop and I have to deal with the emotional flashback first before I can continue communicating with my partner. And that takes a partner who understands what's happening, which I'm gonna jump into later. Now, I want to just list, just because I think it's so helpful for those of you that are listening that may be like, I'm not sure, I don't know if I have it. I want to list for you the symptoms of CPTSD. So he says, We've got those first five, right? We've got our emotional flashbacks, we've got a tyrannical inner and outer critic, we've got the toxic shame, we've got the self-abandonment, social anxiety. Then we also have abject feelings of loneliness and abandonment, fragile self-esteem, attachment disorders. If any of you have ever read the book Attached, I highly have recommended it many times. I'll have to do an episode about it in the future, talking about attachment styles, whether you have an anxious or an avoidant versus secure attachment style. Developmental arrests. He goes into this in the book. Really, really interesting. Relationship difficulties, radical mood vacillation, dissociation by distracting activities or mental processes. I know I do this a lot. Dissociation is where you're getting out of your body. And I love what he says via mental processes. I'm like, yep, using your mind to kind of detach and get yourself out of your body. Hair trigger fight/slash flight responses. This is where you can go from I'm having a conversation to 10 seconds later, I'm like completely activated. Oversensitivity to stressful situations. I'm raising my hand here. That is so true for me. Even situations that other people wouldn't find stressful, sometimes I realize like are just really activating for my body, especially when I'm in like large groups of people or trying new things. And then suicidal ideation. And he talks, one of the things I want to pause and spend a little time on with the suicidal ideation is this part where he talks about passive suicidality, which is where you fantasize about dying without actively proceeding. And I want to take the time to actually read this to y'all because it is definitely something I've experienced and had confusion and shame around. And I have had multiple clients mention it to me as well. And it wasn't until I read this book that I finally had the answer for what is happening. Let me turn to that page. All right. Suicidal here we go. Sorry, no, right here. Passive suicidality is far more common with the CPTSD survivors who I have known, and it ranges from wishing you were dead to fantasizing about ways to end your life. When lost in suicidal ideation, the survivor may even pray to be delivered from this life or fantasize about being taken by some calamitous act of fate. He may even think or obsess without being serious of stepping in front of a car or jumping off a building. Fantasy typically ends, however, without a serious intent to kill yourself. This is as opposed to active suicidality where the person is actively proceeding in the direction of taking her life. I am discussing passive suicidality because it does not merit the same kind of alarm as active suicidality. Passive suicidality is typically a flashback to early childhood when our abandonment was so profound that it was natural for us to wish that God or somebody or something would just put an end to it all. When the survivor catches himself in a suicidal reverie, he will benefit from seeing it both as an emblem of how much pain he is in and as a sign of a particularly intense flashback. Okay, y'all, this is so real. I remember experiencing this a lot when I was in the part of my journey where I was considering divorce, I was questioning the Mormon church, wanting to leave. I can remember driving at times and just hoping I would maybe fall asleep at the will or that a car would hit me accidentally and it just something outside of me that would end my life where I wouldn't have to be responsible for it. And at the heart of all of this, it was just this it felt so excruciating to be faced with this decision to disappoint all of these people in my life by doing what was best for me. And it scared me. It really did. I I remember thinking, what is this? And knowing now that when this comes up, it is a sign of an emotional flashback and an indicator that I'm in pain is so helpful instead of it devolving into all of the weird, what's wrong with me? Why do I want this? I should be so happy. I have all the things I want. And instead realizing, hey, there's really severe trauma here that is present, and let's be gentle. And he also talks about when you're in that, going to use his, he has 13 steps that you can use when you're in a flashback, which I have found incredibly helpful. They are what I use all the time now. Whenever I'm like, I'm in the middle of a flashback, I just I go and I get them. So I wanted to share that because I remember feeling very weird and alone. I'd never heard anybody talk about passive suicidality and knowing it now and being able to, when my clients tell me, and it is typically like, yeah, I'm hoping that I'll get all my car will wreck or something will happen to me, like an accident, and then I don't have to move forward with these really scary choices in my life. Being able to tell them, yeah, this is normal and it's a part of complex PTSD really helps them to not hate themselves for it. Then we understand, okay, there's a reason why this is coming up. So with all of that in mind, why am I sharing this with you? Why do I think understanding complex PTSD matters? Two main things. First, I see it so often, just everywhere, really, in so many of my friends. Often we don't realize the abuse that we grew up in. And if we don't know that it is there, we We internalize these symptoms and we end up thinking that these symptoms are us, and we deal with that by self-abandoning, by ending up self-hating because what we're experiencing is so painful, and it just, you know, we have no understanding of how the external created it, and we think it's just an us problem. And I remember, and I still, I still have to watch this in myself, but I remember this being very excruciatingly painful. Like, in my personal opinion, there are few things more painful than the overwhelming fear of deeply hating yourself, feeling like you are broken and fucked up, and not being able to escape from you because you are the one person you can't leave. Even if, and not to you know, compare, but there is an element of like if somebody outside of you is abusing you, you always know like I can, I can at some point leave. I could leave, I could there's a this person's outside of me, so part of you knows like I could get away, maybe not consciously, but subconsciously. But when it's you, when you are the problem, there's no way out of that except suicide. And that is really, really heavy and super scary for those of us that have experienced it to have that level of not wanting to be yourself, and then the weight, too, of knowing like to get away, you would hurt all these other people. It's very, very painful and very complex. And what understanding complex PTSD did for me is it showed me hey, this is not you. This is a result of the trauma you've been through, and you can heal, you can manage these symptoms. It doesn't have to always be like this. As an example, I talked a little bit about this definitely in previous episodes, but as you guys know, I grew up having no idea. Not a I had no idea how much abuse there was in my family of origin. No idea. The culture in my family was so much, like we are the close family, we are the great family, we are the special family. I completely thought I had an incredible family and a great close relationship with my mom. And I was utterly blind to the toxic dynamics until I started going to therapy, and that was absolutely because I was in such a deep depression and passive suicidality that I was like, I need help. Something's wrong. And I went there because I thought the problem was me. I thought there was something broken about me because everything in my life looked so happy. And why couldn't I be happy in it? I'd been told this would make me happy. This was all the things the husband, the kids, the house, the money. And therapy helped me realize that there actually was a lot of unhealthy in my life. And it wasn't that I was broken, and there was a lot of painful abuse I had hidden away in my body and subconscious that I was living with every day and just not acknowledging. And it was actually, you know, as I ended up setting boundaries and individuating that my symptoms lessened. And looking back now, I'm like, oh my God, what my therapist was teaching me is what he's talking about in this book. She was awakening me to what had happened to me in my childhood, seeing it through a different lens, processing the grief, allowing the anger, and really reclaiming my relationship with myself, letting the relationship with my parents, the false relationship I had built up as a child, of them being these loving, doting parents, letting that die and seeing it for what it was, which was a lot of emotional neglect, verbal abuse, sexual abuse when I was younger, all of that that I had had to hide from myself. And I did that by hating myself instead of allowing myself to be angry at them for what they did to me. And that's a huge piece of the complex PTSD work is really letting your inner child say the things it never got to say when you were young and letting the responsibility be on your parents. I know I was very parentified as a child. In many ways, I look back and I'm like, yeah, I was absolutely raising my parents at different aspects and different times. And to get to grieve that, to get to grieve that I never really had a childhood where I felt safe enough to, after the abuse with my father around age four or five, I never really remember after that feeling truly safe to play, to explore, to be creative, to really be myself. I immediately went into a space of what do I have to do to keep these people happy? And then just completely contorting and turning myself into whatever I felt that was. First of all, we have to know that that we have complex PTSD so that we can stop self-abandoning and realize that the symptoms we're dealing with do not mean we are broken. It just means we've got some symptom management and healing to do in our lives. And as I'm gonna talk about at the end of this episode, when you start doing that, oh my God, y'all, life gets really good. I've done a lot of work over the last seven years, but the work I've been doing this last month around actively intentionally managing my CPTSD has been like really, really life-changing. But before we go there, I want to talk about the second reason that I feel this matters. And that is something he'll talk about in the book where he brings up this idea of regression. And that regression is what happens when we're having emotional flashbacks, and then that, you know, that combo of all of it. We've got these emotional flashbacks, we've got the inner critic, we've got the self-abandonment, and they're all playing and compounding until we, because we're not able to manage them, we don't know what's happening, we get into a really deep hole that feels super overwhelming. And I've watched, especially one of my clients this last year, like I didn't realize it at the time, but because neither of us, she didn't know she had complex PTSD, I didn't even know, neither of us knew it existed, nor did we know that she probably had it. But now after reading this work and sharing it with her, it does seem like this last year she had a pretty big trauma happen early on in 2023. And looking back, we can see how she was going into emotional flashback, inner critics, self-abandonment. We didn't know how to manage it. And so it just started to spiral and then it compounds until finally a year later, at the end of the year, she's kind of in this space of like, I don't know who I am, I don't know if I trust myself, what's happening? And that's where you get the regression, where you're like, who I can't even remember who I like a year ago, I know I felt happy and confident and brave and like we were making progress. And now how are we here? Welcome to regression. And why that's so helpful is because in those moments it's really hard not that's just gonna spiral you into more self-abandonment. Like, what's wrong with me? Why am I here? But if you know, oh my God, I think I'm in a regression, then you can start untangling and working back from that. I too recently had a moment where I'd been working on something personal for the last two years. And I'd say about two months ago, it didn't turn out like I had thought it would. I had this very specific idea of what I thought was going to happen, and it did not happen. At the time, I didn't realize how triggering this was, but I know now in hindsight, it was a huge, terrifying trigger. It shook a lot of my belief in myself. It brought up terrifying ideas of like, can I trust myself? Am I on the right path? All of the abandonment, maybe I'm not loved by the universe, maybe I really am just here, and all I can depend on is myself, which is super scary because I also recognize, like, yes, I am amazing, and I also have limitations. And it was intense. Like, and at the time I hadn't accepted yet that I have CPTSD. So I was not conscious about actively managing the flashbacks and the inner critic. And within a week, I was having super intense symptoms of toxic shame, dissociation, and terrifying of all, the passive suicidal ideation. And it scared the shit out of me. Like, I remember thinking, oh my God, I swore I would never feel this way again. Like I could, this was bringing back feelings from like when I was getting divorced, that kind of level of fear. And I was like, how could I have done so much personal work, you know, weekly coaching, trauma processing, working with therapy, working with therapists, doing somatic healing, doing body work, just like on and on and on, so much work, and still be back here? Like, how? And um I had some incredible friends at the time that I was able to be really vulnerable with and very open about what was happening, and they just held incredibly beautiful space without reacting or freaking out or shaming me. And I was able to make it through that rough patch. And as I got through it, it took a little while, but with time, it started that deep, deep depression started to lift again. The lights kind of sink the sun came back out, started to shine again. I tentatively was like, okay, maybe we do wanna, maybe we do want to do this human thing. And I now know, because it was coming out of that and then finding the book, what was happening. And I know that the piece I was missing was this acknowledgement and acceptance that recovery will be a lifelong process for me. That the trauma I experienced in childhood is not something I can just heal from and be done with. And that was a very hard thing for me to accept. I remember when I read, and I'm gonna read the section to y'all because it's super important. But I remember reading it probably, I don't know, a month and a half ago, and just being like, no, no, I don't want it to be a lifelong process. I want to just heal and move on. And um, that's what was blocking me because then when you think recovery is a one-time thing, you know, you're gonna like, I'm gonna heal and then we're gonna be done, and I'm never gonna have an emotional flashback. Well, guess what? Then when an emotional flashback shows up and kicks your ass, what do you think? Something's wrong with me. I must not have done it right, I must have done the wrong healing, I needed to do different healing. And you can spend your whole life chasing this goal of being healed and missing out on loving yourself now, on just like, yes, I'm gonna have emotional flashbacks. Of course I'm going to, as you guys know from that last episode. I have been through a lot of shit. And instead of shaming and hating myself, that the repercussions of that life and that childhood are emotional flashbacks and this inner critic accepting that they're here and then moving into a space of love and extra support for myself. Like, okay, I have this and now I'm gonna take care of myself. So I want to read this section in the book where he talks about this piece. He says, It is exceedingly difficult to accept the proposition, the fact, that recovery is never complete. And although we can expect our flashbacks to markedly decrease over time, it is tremendously difficult and sometimes impossible to let go of the salvation fantasy that we will one day be forever free of them. Yet when we do not loosen our grip on the salvation fantasy, we remain extremely susceptible to blaming ourselves every time we have a flashback. Understanding this is so crucial because recovery typically progresses in a process that has many temporary regressions. Moreover, most recoveries often have the unfortunate subjective experience that the temporary regression feels as permanent as concrete. This is especially true because of the interminability are big. Interminability feeling of flashbacks, which is this, he says, when we flashback, we regress to our child mind, which was incapable of imagining a future any different than the everlasting present of being so abandoned. So, how can we come to bear the knowledge that our offered awful childhoods have created some permanent damage? It helps me to see my CPTSD as somewhat analogous to diabetes, a condition that will need management throughout my life. This is a piece of bad news that naturally feels offensively unpalatable. But the good news, as with diabetes, is that as we become more skilled at flashback management, CPTSD can gradually become infrequently bothersome. And even more importantly, we can evolve towards leading increasingly rich and rewarding lives. Even better news is that CPTSD, when efficiently managed, eventually bestows gifts. It comes with significant silver linings, unavailable to those less traumatized, as we will see at the end of the chapter, which by the way, this chapter, if you guys, when you get your book, just want to read that section is chapter four. This has been the case for me. Although it was so hard, I remember reading this section to hear this. And I am still surrendering into accepting it. But I have really made incredible progress this month around accepting that complex PTESD is something I live with every day. As I've accepted it though, I've realized, yes, that's hard. But like he says, it is so freeing because once again, you cannot take care of something that you refuse to accept. And I was telling a client about it the other day, and it was so beautiful. It was giving her the diabetes analogy, and she said something like, Yeah, I'd rather not lose my feet. And I just thought that was such an incredible example because yeah, in diabetes, if you do not manage your diabetes, you can end up losing limbs from not managing it. And it's the same thing with complex PTSD. There are huge repercussions that come about when we don't manage it. And I've I've seen it, I've I've lost relationships from not understanding my flashbacks and being able to communicate them. And so I want to share a little bit with you how the last like month and a half, what are the results I've seen of giving up on the salvation fantasy that one day this won't be what I experience and what I have to live with? What I've seen, these are the incredible silver linings, is I am so much kinder to myself and others, which I I have come a long, long ways from where I was seven years ago. But this has taken me in into an even deeper level of just immense compassion for myself and others. I am more intentional about what I do and don't take on. That has shown up most like strongly in the way I'm dating now. In understanding I have complex PTSD, I'm way more intentional with who I choose to date. And actually, I've even redefined for me like what I want in a relationship. And for me now, it's that I want to date someone who understands their own trauma, can acknowledge it, is healing it while I'm doing my work, and that together we can heal and be that kind of support and that space for each other to heal from our trauma, to form secure attachment, to yeah, really, and he'll he'll talk about this in the book that one of the most important ways we can heal complex PTSD is when we have secure partners who are able to do this work with us. I love that I communicate more clearly with my children when I'm in one. I tend to get flashbacked a lot with my children. Just the pressure I of being in a parent and having to take care of others is very triggering for my inner child. So I get a lot of emotional flashbacks with them. And I've explained to them, like I've sat down and shared with them my trauma in my childhood, and that because of that, I have complex PTSD, and this is what it looks like. Sometimes I have these emotional flashbacks where I feel small and scared and frightened like a little child. And when that's happening, I'll communicate with them. Hey guys, my nervous system's feeling dysregulated. I think I need to like go take a breather or and I'm like, yay, right? Like I never my parents never did that. My parents never at any point when they were overwhelmed or freaking out, stopped and were like, hey, this is a me thing. This isn't you, and I'm gonna go take care of myself. It was always an outward projection. It was always a like, why can't you guys behave, or why can't you guys be quiet, or why can't you guys keep the house clean? So that has been, you know, really beautiful to be able to just help my children not take on, you know, the the reality that I do often get flashbacked, and it's not their fault in any way. They are amazing, like lovely, incredible humans, and I think it's really helped them knowing, like, oh yeah, mom, mom went through some stuff. So I do want to dive in a little bit deeper too, into something I'm really like obsessed with right now and really enjoying, which was what I was talking about earlier with this change and how I view relationships and what I'm wanting. And I actually this is just the beauty of the universe, right? So right after I yeah, right after I started reading and like realizing I had complex PTSD, I ended up meeting someone new. And it was probably on our like second date that I got to experience this with him firsthand. And I had told my my girlfriend, Quinn, when I was learning about complex PTSD, how much I wanted to only date someone that I could talk freely about my emotional flashbacks with. Because if you've ever dated someone who probably doesn't have complex PTSD and you have a flashback with them, I hate this feeling of like I'm the crazy one. Like, why are you freaking out? Why are you? It just irks me to no end because I know that I am competent and smart and brave and all of those other things. So when I flashback and a partner is like unable to hold space for that, it's really, really it just compounds the trigger, compounds the trauma. So I told her, I really want to date someone that I would be able to just, when I'm in an emotional flashback, tell him. And sure enough. With this person that I'd met, we pretty early on were very open about both of our own childhood trauma, which was really nice to just know, okay, we both, we both understand that we have this history. And then, and this was such an interesting trigger. Like, this is just such an example that triggers can come from all sorts of places. It was the kind of the first time we had, yeah, it was. It was the first date where we had kissed and we had been kissing a little bit more. And while we were kissing, I had this like electric rush while kissing him that just completely overwhelmed me. And I love that in that moment, instead of like trying to manage it or not be weird, I just stepped back and was like, Woo, okay. I'm feeling a little bit like overwhelmed at the moment, and I just need to take a second. And I didn't know it at the time, but actually that intense emotion had triggered an emotional flashback. And what it was, in hindsight, looking back now, is I felt like immense desire for him. And that felt unsafe because if I desire someone, if I want to be close to them, then there's a chance they could leave me and abandon me. Now I'm in this emotional flashback. I don't at the at the time know that it's happening. I just know that, like, woo, I've stepped back. And then all of a sudden, we are sitting on the couch and all of a sudden I start trying to control him and define the relationship and being like, where are you at? How open are you to this? What's happening? Are you dating anybody else? Are you this? And it was really, I didn't, you know, I was in it at the time, so I couldn't see how different it was. But looking back, I was just wanting to feel safe, right? Oh my God, I'm feeling desire. I don't feel safe. I could lose this person, so I'm gonna try to externally control him to make myself feel safe. And thankfully, because he's grounded in himself, he did not play that game and just very calmly, you know, said what he'd said earlier, which was like, hey, we're just gonna keep seeing where this is going. It's still really early. I'm enjoying being with you. So he didn't assuage my fear, which of course leaves me in my feelings, which was actually a gift, because it was in that moment that I realized, oh my God, I think I'm in an emotional flashback. And where I wouldn't have done this in the past, I just immediately told him. I communicated with him. I was like, oh my God, I think I'm actually having an emotional flashback. It's this part of complex PTSD. And he beautifully just calmly said, What do you need from me? And I just said, I just need to slow down. I need to breathe. And literally, we just sat there and I just sat with my eyes closed and like deepened my breath. And I went through some of the steps in my head that Pete Walker outlines in the book, like reminding myself, like, I'm having an emotional flashback. When I'm in an emotional flashback, I feel the fear and terror of being a child. I am an adult now. I have resources, I have people who love me. And it took a good probably five minutes to down regulate back into my body. And once I did, I'm gonna kind of get emotional. It was so beautiful. Because after I had regulated back down, there was just this like rush of joy and immense love for myself and this feeling of like you're doing it. You're no longer abandoning yourself in moments of flashbacks to try and make it more comfortable for someone else, or to try and manage their feelings, or to not seem weird, and at the same time feeling this immense love for this partner who is holding space, who's who doesn't need me to do anything or be anything. He doesn't need to care. You know, he didn't like, oh, I need to caretake or I need to fix this, and he didn't, oh, I need to get away because this is awkward. He just stayed. And it was yeah, you guys, that is like absolute magic. I can't even tell you. I have never had something that um clear in a relationship where I've really been able to articulate, own, be completely present with myself, and have a partner support that. Since then, I have had multiple flashbacks when we've been together, and each time I just communicate, like, hey, I'm in an emotional flashback. The beautiful thing too is he's had a few himself, and with each one, we just end up supporting each other through them. And even beyond that, like I've noticed I ebb and flow. Some days I will outside of the relationship, like just in my normal life, some days I'll only have one flashback or I'll have no flashbacks, and other days I can have five or six. And they can be triggered by like tough, upsetting things, but also by feeling really happy or good, like with that kiss. But now, whenever I do, I just I pull out the book or I have a picture on my phone for when I don't have the book with me and I just go through the steps. And it's that simple and absolutely life-changing. I highly recommend giving this book a read if you are at all intrigued, if it at all seems like, yeah, this might be something I'm dealing with as well. Because since learning about this and leaning into accepting this about myself in a supportive and kind way, I have noticed this last month and a half like a marked increase in my abilities to be in my body and grounded in my present experience. There's a lot more joy and excitement. There's more communication and connection in my moments of flashback rather than isolating and shaming myself. And I really, my hope is that for those of you that are healing and keep having these moments where you feel trapped again and have this overwhelming dread and out-of-body terror and abandonment, especially those of you that are trying to date and have relationships, like that is the hardest relationships trigger this the most, I feel like. And obviously, most of you are most of you listening will be married, so maybe not dating, but like in your marriage, this is gonna be triggered. It's relationships that be because so much of it comes out of those seminal relationships with your parents. So, like I said, I get a lot of flashbacks when I'm around my children, I get flashbacks when I'm around someone I'm dating, but realizing it doesn't have to lead to these spirals and these regressions that you can, there are tools that you can get the book and you can begin this beautiful journey of learning how to manage and support yourself with it. So, with that in mind, I just want to, yeah, thank you all for spending this time with me. This was an episode that I really, really wanted to put out into the world, along with the one last week. Know that I love you, I see you, you are not alone on this journey. Deep breath. Till next time.