Aware And Prepared

When Relaxing Feels Impossible: Healing from Complex PTSD

• Mandi Pratt • Season 3 • Episode 27

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Ever find it hard to relax like your body doesn’t know how to come down from survival mode? You’re not alone! 

In this solo episode, I’m wrapping up our Complex PTSD Series by sharing some additional final thoughts on what trauma has looked like in my own life, including:

-  How trauma may contribute to early menopause

-  Difficulty processing emotions

-  The inability to relax

-  Reflections on hypervigilance, numbness, and learning self-compassion

Hear practical ways to start reconnecting with your body and emotions safely.

You are not alone! Healing, peace, and self-trust are absolutely possible.

Resources Mentioned:

The primary purpose of the Women Aware and Prepared Podcast is to educate and inform. This podcast series does not constitute advice or services. Please use common sense for your own situation.

 Hey, brave one. Welcome to the Aware and Prepared Podcast. I'm your host, Mandy Pratt, trauma-informed, resilient speaker, domestic violence victim advocate, and narcissistic abuse survivor. Here we keep it real with true crime stories and real world strategies to prevent emotional and physical harm. My guests and I share a mix of insight and survivor grit, all to help you feel safer, trust yourself more deeply.

And live with greater peace and power. Let's trade fear for freedom and step into the peace that you deserve.

Today's a solo episode, me only. I'm wrapping up our complex PTSD series. Fun, fun. But I know that there were some helpful things because you guys shared that with me, so that was exciting. So I just wanted to touch on something. That I got a lot of feedback on, and that was people hearing me say that I believe that because of my complex PTSD that caused early menopause for me, so early perimenopause and then menopause and post menopause and health issues.

It's interesting because there are some studies coming out, but I feel like we have a long way to go on that and I am excited because next week we are going to truly wrap up on this series as I have a special guest and actually it'll be a team with me that works at the SUNY up in New York State Trauma Center.

And they do trauma informed yoga. So I'm super excited to have them next week if all goes well. But I just wanted to answer some questions. So I had shared with you that having trauma, I believe, has caused me to have early menopause, and I did find some articles that were talking about this issue with.

Uh, women veterans that had PTSD. So I will link to that in the show notes in case you want to read that. But I had shared with you a couple episodes ago, I believe it was three ago, where I did a solo episode and sharing with you, you know, just. Besides the menopause issue, what trauma looks like in my own life, and just the hyper independence.

I talked about that so much so that I feel like my diaphragm is still kind of a rock. So, well, Pete, working on that. And I know everybody's different, so maybe for you, if you've been through some trauma, it's a different part of your body, like your neck and shoulders or whatever it might be. It's been interesting too.

You know, just I'm gonna share openly and honestly, just realizing also how slow it takes me to process things. So somebody will say something to me and. You know, I don't just think about it later that day. It's like days later or like a week where it like sinks in and then I can process that. So that's been really interesting.

And then also kind of coming back to myself and realizing for so long. I had felt numb because it wasn't safe to feel my feelings basically stuck in hypervigilance. I was in survival mode for so long, and to be in survival mode, you can't stop to feel your feelings. So it wasn't until pretty recently that I started realizing, jeez, you know, my emotions are so stuffed in there, stored in there because I had to survive.

That, you know, it took so long for those to come out and we know how important it is to feel our feelings, you know, with support, especially if you've gone through trauma. And I just had two people, two experts on who are great resources for you. Katherine is a therapist in California who can help. Brit Frank is a bestselling author, therapist out of Kansas who can help lots of resources for you.

You can read Britt's books. So many good things. So it's important to feel those feelings in a safe place. And we were talking about how self-compassion is key. So even now, like I notice, I really have troubles relaxing. Ask my husband, he'll be happy to tell you about that. He's a pro. He's a pro. He works really hard, and then he comes home and he completely relaxes, and I'm like flitting and fluttering all over the place and it's really hard for me to relax, but at least I know from a certain time to a certain time in the evening.

I just. Shut everything down, put my phone out of sight, out of mind, and at least can do that for 45 minutes because we watch a show that's very involved, you know, so it makes me kind of forget where I'm at. So that's super good for me. But I've spoken to other trauma survivors who also say yes. They can't relax.

And we've spoken about this before and shared that. Yeah, like we truly believe that it's because of that hyper vigilance being in fight or flight. And like if we relaxed, then the next emergency happened and our body thought, okay, it's not safe to relax. You gotta be on heightened alert because you never know when the shoe's gonna drop.

Right? So if that's you, I just wanted you to know you're not alone. And learning how to relax. Again, I shared with you in the past two experts we were talking about that read Britt's books. That really helps with that. And then just be patient with yourself, right? Self-compassion. So I just wanted to wrap that up and tell you main point, you are not alone.

If this is you, if you can't relax, if you process things slow. If you feel numb with your feelings, those are some things I just wanted you to know about as we wrap up and wanted to really take that time to soak in the two experts we just had because that provided a lot of help. So I wanna make sure if you didn't hear those past two episodes with Catherine, Lucy and Brit Frank.

Stop everything you're doing and go back and listen to those very actionable help and make sure that you share those with somebody. How many other people do you know that are having issues right now? Uh, just about everybody. I'd say at the time of this recording, October 20, 25. The news is horrible and you know, just a lot of things going on.

So I'm here for you and I am prepping my next talk. I'm going out. Um, I'm a resilient speaker and I am preparing my keynote for the social work conference I'm doing in a couple weeks. So it's very interesting because that leads us into our next topic, which is domestic violence. Again, woo-hoo. Fun topic, but you guys seem to really gel with these true life stories that we share.

A lot of you have been through this, and I'm sorry you have, and you wanna make sure others don't go through that, or you wanna just feel not alone. And then for others of you who haven't, you like, never want this to happen to you or your loved ones. So here at or unprepared, I talk about both prevention and healing.

So now that we've talked a lot about healing and we've got one more next week, hopefully we're gonna dig back into that prevention. And so I'm going to share with you. More about, you know, what does domestic violence really look like? Let's share some true life stories that aren't too triggering because we just think of domestic violence as like physical violence or sexual violence, but there's so much more to it.

So let's make sure that we're all aware of what that really looks like, because if you see that in your relationship, run now, please. Because it's so hard to get out. The longer you wait, you can't change somebody else and it's not gonna get better. Let me just be frank with you. Here's what I wish I had.

If somebody had told me when I was dating, Hey, if you sense anything, really pay attention to that. Look into it, right? And. A lot of what I do is I go out and speak and help people develop those life skills. So if you do see red flags, you have what you need. You can actually trust your intuition and act on it to get the hell out of there now.

So that's what I'm going to focus on next. Just wanted to you to get a heads up on that. Thanks for tuning into the Aware and Prepared Podcast. Curious how tuned in your intuition really is. Take the free quiz at Aware and Prepared Life and get your score. See how sharp your inner guide is. You are worthy of a safe and peaceful life.

Talk with you next week and please share this episode with someone who came to mind. While you were listening, click on the top right menu in your podcast app. It might just be what they needed today.