May 8, 2025 • 39 mins
People from Complex Trauma often create the very things they hate and are trying to avoid - like abandonment, disrespect and repeating the same mistakes. Why is that? And what can they do to change?
This is a lecture originally published on YouTube on Aug 6, 2021. We are making some of Tim's lectures available as bonus episodes on the podcast so you can listen on the go. To see all of Tim's talks, visit YouTube, where you can find hundreds of his talks both old and new.
Subscribe to stay tuned!
Connect with us:
Website: www.timfletcher.ca
YouTube: @TimFletcher
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Instagram: @timfletcherco
Facebook: TimFletcherCo
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Have a question for Tim Fletcher? Submit it here! https://bit.ly/TimewithTimQuestionBox
Intro/Outro Music:
‘Take Your Pick’ by Aaron Lieberman
YouTube Audio Library License - Royalty-Free
Disclaimers:
The Time with Tim Fletcher Podcast is for informational purposes only to provide understanding, learning, and awareness about complex trauma. No information published here can replace professional evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are in crisis, please contact your local crisis hotline at
This is a lecture originally published on YouTube on Aug 6, 2021. We are making some of Tim's lectures available as bonus episodes on the podcast so you can listen on the go. To see all of Tim's talks, visit YouTube, where you can find hundreds of his talks both old and new.
Subscribe to stay tuned!
Connect with us:
Website: www.timfletcher.ca
YouTube: @TimFletcher
YouTube (Podcast): @TimeWithTimPodcast
Instagram: @timfletcherco
Facebook: TimFletcherCo
TikTok: @timfletcher_co
Have a question for Tim Fletcher? Submit it here! https://bit.ly/TimewithTimQuestionBox
Intro/Outro Music:
‘Take Your Pick’ by Aaron Lieberman
YouTube Audio Library License - Royalty-Free
Disclaimers:
The Time with Tim Fletcher Podcast is for informational purposes only to provide understanding, learning, and awareness about complex trauma. No information published here can replace professional evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are in crisis, please contact your local crisis hotline at
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome. I'm Andy Carlson and you're listening to the Time
with Tim podcast. Today we're sharing one of Tim's insightful talks,
originally published on YouTube. Whether this is your first time
or you've been with us for a while, we hope
this lecture inspires reflection and offers helpful tools for your journey.
Let's take this time to learn together.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to another Friday Night.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
We've been going through a series where we're taking a
deeper look at the sixty characteristics of complex trauma, and
today we come to one that we call People from
complex trauma create what they hate, or they create what
they're trying to avoid, or they create the opposite of
what they want to happen. And it happens all the time.
(00:54):
And a common question is why do I do that?
So before I answer that, let me just kind of
set the stage by painting this back drop. People from
complex trauma grew up in environments where there's lots of danger,
or where their needs aren't met, or where there's many
(01:15):
violations of love. So there's lying, there's abuse, there isn't justice.
All of those things are happening, and they hate that
aspect of their childhood and they never want to see
that happen in their life again. They want their needs met,
et cetera. And so they start out with a determination,
(01:38):
I'm never going to be abandoned again. I'm never going
to be disrespected again. I'm never going to be lied
to again. And then they move into adult life and
they end up being abandoned again and disrespected again, and
it happens over and over. So they create, without realizing it,
the very environment that it ends up creating what they've
(02:01):
been trying to avoid, or the thing that they hate.
So let me give you a couple examples just to
help you understand it. So somebody that's been abandoned goes,
that is the worst emotional experience to go through. Being
abandoned makes you feel like you don't matter at all.
I never want that to happen again. So they get
(02:23):
in a relationship determine that they'll never be abandoned. But
what they then do is they're super needy, or they
test the person all the time, or they try to
control the person all the time, and after a while,
the other person goes, I'm done with this, and they
walk out of the relationship and the person feels abandoned again.
(02:43):
Or I've had so many people say to me, I
grew up and I said, I'm never going to be
like my dad. My dad was an addict. My dad
had anger issues. My dad was in jail periodically, and
they are determined not to become their dad. And when
they hit at a life, they're an attict there in
jail and they.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Got anger issues.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Or I don't want a husband like my last husband,
so I'm going to find a new husband who's not
going to be like my last husband. And they date
and they end up married to somebody that they think
is totally opposite of their last husband, and then they
find out he's very much like their last husband. Or
(03:27):
I don't want my kids to make the same bad
decisions that I made, And so they start out in
parenting to try to make sure their kids don't repeat
their mistakes, and they find out fifteen twenty years later
that their kids have made the same decisions that they
made when they were a teenager. They created what they
(03:50):
were trying to avoid, what they hate. They created the
opposite of what they wanted. So why is that, Well,
let me give you some reasons, because there's many different
factors that can come to play on why we create
what we hate. So the first one is a hyper need.
(04:15):
So when a need is not met in a child,
they can go in two different directions extremes. They can
try to shut that need off and we'll get back
to that in a minute, or it can create a
hyper need. I need it, I want it, I want it,
I want it. And so let me give you a
couple examples. Let's say a child was not validated and
(04:38):
we all have a need to be validated, and so
when they come to their teen years in adult life,
they have this hyper need of wanting to be validated,
so they chase people around. Was I good enough? Was
I good enough? They're always looking for applause, for pats
on the back.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
And what happens with that.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Hyper need, people get tired of having that person always
looking for validation and they stop giving them validation. So
the child has a hyper need for validation because they
never got it as a child.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
But what they end up is creating is nobody wants to.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Give them validation exactly what happened when they were a child.
Or let's say a person who was never heard whenever
they tried to explain or give their opinion. Nobody listened
to them, so now they're going, I need to be
listened to. So whenever they're in a conversation, they overtalk,
they over explain, they talk too much, they butt in
(05:38):
to get heard, and after a while people go, enough
with this person, I'm not even listening to them, So
now they're not heard again. They created what they are
trying to avoid, or a person who was never understood.
Nobody took the time to understand where they're coming from,
so that hurts, and now today they go, I need
(06:00):
to be understood, and so now they over explain everything.
Whenever they think somebody doesn't understand them, they chase them arounsing,
let me explain them, explain them, explain, and pretty soon
people are tired of that, and so now they end
up not being understood again because nobody wants to listen
to their never ending explanations. Or let's say a child
(06:23):
was made to feel stupid all the time, so now
they think, the thing that I need to do in
order to not be perceived as stupid is to give
very academic answers to share my opinion all the time.
But after a while people go I'm tired of listening
to this person and they get treated as if they're
(06:45):
stupid again. So that can happen over and over. So
those that hyper need situation can set a person up
to not get that need met exactly what happened when
they were a child. But then there's another part to
(07:05):
this need thing. So sometimes when you shut that need off,
you don't even think it's a need, and you just
think you have other needs. But you don't understand that
that deep, deep need trumps all of the lesser needs
in your life. So let me give you example. Let's
(07:26):
say that you were rejected and abandoned. That hurts like crazy,
but you just shut that off and you basically went to,
I don't need people, I don't care about people. I'm
going to isolate, I'm never going to let people see
the real me. I am going to wear masks, I
(07:48):
am going to put up walls so that nobody can
get close enough to hurt me again. And so you
think my need is to be self sufficient. My need
is to be liked by people, and to wear masks
and to have walls and not be authentic.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
All of those things, those are my needs.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
But you don't understand that your deep, deep need is
to connect, to be authentic, and so.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
You live in isolation.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
But now you feel a deep loneliness, a deep longing
to be loved.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Those two deep needs.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Of connection and love are not being met by your
solution to never being rejected or abandoned again, and that
desire to be loved will cause you to seek out relationships.
It will cause you to misread flags in relationships and
get into relationships with unsafe people, and before you know what,
(08:47):
you're getting hurt and abandoned and rejected again. So not
understanding the deep, deep needs of the human being, needs
that many have turned off because of early wounds, those
still will ultimately trump everything else. Another one that I
(09:08):
see all the time is a person who grows up
with a family where they're constantly shamed, made to feel
like they don't matter, like they're stupid, et cetera. And
so they go need I don't need that validation, I
don't need all these different needs met. But what they
don't realize is they have this deep, deep longing to
(09:31):
be validated by their family, deep deep longing to be
accepted and to belong by their family, And so they
go into recovery, and they think all my needs are
is I need to make a few friends, I need
to do my recovery work. But they don't understand how
(09:52):
deep the longing is for their family to validate them
and accept them. And they keep running back to their
family for validation, and they keep getting shamed. The very
thing they don't want they ended up creating because they
didn't understand that deep need. Now there's another need kind
(10:12):
of variable here that is important to understand. In the
case of sexual abuse. For a young child, it awakens
a drive before kind of the plan time, the natural
time when it would be awakened. So the sex drive
normally awakens eleven twelve years old. But let's say a
(10:36):
child's molested at five or six. What can happen when
you have that drive awaken before the plan time is again,
a child go in two different directions. They just hate sex,
turn it off it's a dirty, bad thing. Or they
(10:56):
can have a hyper sex drive and they can become promiscuous.
But what happened to that little child was I never
want to be molested again. I never want to be
sexually abused again.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
I hate it.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
But then because they end up with this hyper sex
drive and they're promiscuous all the time.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Guess what happens.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
They end up in situations where they get sexually abused. Again,
they created what they were trying to avoid without even
realizing it. Now, there's another reason why people create what
they hate, and that is because they turned off their intuition,
(11:41):
their radar system, their gut.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
So for the.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Question I get asked all the time, is people from
trauma end up with more trauma in their adult life
than people from healthy homes who don't have childhood trauma.
Why is it that people from trauma end up with
more trauma? And I think often it's around this radar system.
(12:08):
So consider this scenario. A child is going to be
going to their uncles or to their babysitters, and their
gut says that person is not safe. They tell their parents,
I don't feel comfortable with that babysitter, I don't feel
comfortable with my uncle.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
They're listening to their gut.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
But their parents says, oh, there's nothing wrong with them.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Go ahead, and they go and they get molested.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
What they then do is tell their parents and their
parents as you're making it up, no, that really didn't happen. Oh,
it's your fault, whatever, and they get sent to that
uncle or that babysitter again. So what the child realizes
is my radar system, which is designed to warn me
(12:58):
to go get away from that person. I am not
able to get away from that person because I'm a
child and I have parents who are forcing me to
go to that person. So why do I want to
radar system when I can't listen to it? It's just
an annoying They have sirens going off when I can't
listen to them. So they shut down their alarm system,
(13:23):
their gut, their intuition because there's no point in having
it and it's annoying. So now they get to adult
life and they're going out on a date and their
alarm system says red flags, red flags, danger, danger, but
they've turned it off and they just walk into danger
(13:45):
now and get traumatized again. The third reason why people
create what they hate or end up in situations that
they've been trying to avoid is because of their default
setting that they developed as a child. What was their
(14:07):
normal as a child. So, for example, a child grows
up with a narcissist dad or a narcissist.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Mom, and what happens with that is.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
They hate that narcissist dad, they hate that narcisst mum,
but that's their normal, that's all they know. That's how
they've learned to relate to people.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
And that's their life.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
And so without realizing it, they go into adult life
hating narcissists but feeling the most comfortable with narcissists, being
drawn to narcissist because it feels normal, and ending up
back in the exact situation they hated when they were
a child, or many grew up in homes where they
(14:58):
were disrespected, made fun of, put down. They hated that,
but it was their normal, and so now they're drawn
into situations in other relationships with people who realize I
can put this person down and get away with it,
and the person just takes it because that's their normal.
(15:21):
It feels normal. So they end up in situations much
like their childhood just because that's where their comfort zone is.
So if you consider the fact that a child growing
up in complex trauma could be growing up with hundreds
of unhealthy family dynamics, relationship dynamics, coping dynamics, but they
(15:46):
don't know they're unhealthy because it's their normal, and so
now they go into adult life and they gravitate to
what feels normal. There's a fourth one I think is
so important to understand, and it's to understand the power
of a parent's influence.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
We often think.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
That we are deeply influenced by what our parents say
to us and do to us, or do their actions
and their words, and those are the two things only
that influence us. But do you realize that you are
also influenced by who your parent is, by their beliefs,
(16:30):
by their values, by their attitudes, by their fears, by
their emotional makeup, by their coping, by their thinking. All
of those things you're picking up you're affected by, you're
influenced by without even realizing it. And so your child,
(16:54):
your parents are like this greenhouse, that incubator that puts
all of this influence on you, and it shapes you,
informs you without you even realizing it. And so those
things you just pick up, they become your normal, They
become your autopilot. You learn to cope with like your
(17:17):
parents did without even realizing it. You respond to stress
like your parents did without even realizing it. You develop
attitudes that your parents have without even realizing it the
power of a parent's influence. I can hate what they
did and hate what they said, but then I end
up like them because I picked up all of their
(17:39):
ways of thinking and coping their values and beliefs.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
That is a.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Very hard thing to accept, but it shows the power
of parents influence.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
And let me take that further. We often when we
think of pro.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Creation, think of creating a physical baby. We're going to
create physical life, so we think of pro creation in
terms of physical life only. But think of it also
that in pro creation, I'm not just creating a physical life.
I'm creating a soul. I'm creating a human being, a soul.
(18:23):
Think about that. It's really easy to create a physical life.
But do you realize it's easy to create an unhealthy soul,
but very hard to create a healthy soul.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Take it further.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
I can create a physical life just by one act,
but to create a healthy physical soul takes years of
consistent being healthy, influencing them, modeling for them, responding to
them in healthy ways.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
It takes years to create a healthy soul.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
One act to create a physical life and easy to
create an unhealthy soul. Take it further, to create a
physical life requires only an action. To create a healthy
soul requires words, actions and who I am, my attitudes,
(19:27):
my responses. If I am healthy, I can create a
healthy soul. If I am not healthy, I cannot create
a healthy soul. I will create an unhealthy soul. So
pro creation is more than just giving physical life passing
on my genes. It's creating a soul who's like my soul.
(19:52):
And so if I am going to pass on healthy,
I have to be healthy. So here's one of the
hard things I think for people to face when we.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Look at create what we hate.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
We often think of create what we hate only in
terms of doing it in my own life. But what
I want you to see is we create what we
hate not just in our own life, but also in
our children, because if I don't get healthy myself, I
will just pass on unhealthiness and they will be like
me and like their grandparents, who I hated and didn't
(20:30):
want to be like. That is a hard reality, but
that is what happens. Creating what we hate becomes a
generational thing if we don't stop the cycle by becoming
healthy ourself. Let me give you a fifth reason why
we create what we hate and it's called cognitive dissonance.
(20:54):
So cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort we feel when
our mind entertains two contradictory concepts at the same time.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
So let me give you kind of an example of this.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
There's what I refer to as healthy cognitive dissonance. It's
designed as a good thing. So you have a healthy
belief that lying is wrong, that stealing is wrong, that
is drilled into you, that trains your conscience. Now you
(21:31):
consider stealing from someone and lying to someone, and all
of a sudden, you have two contradictory things happening inside
of you, and it creates this discomfort. I don't like
what I'm feeling right now. There's this dissonance inside of me.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Now that was designed to be a.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Good thing, because what it is saying is if I
program my conscience with healthy, whenever I try to become unhealthy,
there will be dissonance which will motivate me to not
do the unhealthy, to say, I don't like how this
makes me feel, so I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
That's the healthy design.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
But now enter complex trauma, So two different scenarios. What
happens in complex trauma is a child has to do
unhealthy tools in order to survive, so they can be
told lying is bad, but in order to get unjustly punished,
(22:34):
they got to lie about a lot of things to survive.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
So their conscience has been trained to not lie.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
But they have to lie to survive, so they just
harden their conscience. They shut it up. They don't want
it chirping at them, so that can happen. Secondly, you
can get a conscience that's mistrained by wrong beliefs. Your
family can say to you you should never say no.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
You need to please people all the time.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Love is never saying no to anybody, and they drill
that into you, and when you try to say no
at times you get punished for that, and so it's
trained into you that never say no. But then you
come into recovery and you realize that love says no.
(23:33):
Love sets boundaries. There are times when it is right
to say no.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
But what does that feel like? Now? Inside your brain?
Speaker 3 (23:44):
It is healthy, is contradicting what you were raised with.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
You didn't know it was unhealthy.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
But now when you want to get healthy, now you're
you got dissonance, cognitive dissonance inside you. It doesn't feel
good to now start saying no, You now feel guilty.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
You now feel all kinds of unrest inside of you.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
And so complex trauma creates a belief system of lies,
so that now when you want to choose the truth,
it creates cognitive dissonance. Complex trauma mistrains your conscience. So
now when you want to act in healthy ways, you
feel cognitive dissonance. So you've got to fight against that.
(24:28):
So let me give you another example. Let's say your
experience and what your family taught you is you can't
trust anybody. People can't be trusted, and that was drilled
into you, and your experience seemed to confirm it. Now
you come into recovery and you go, I like this person.
I see that I need people in my life I
(24:50):
need to trust. Now, when you go I think I'm
going to trust this person, you feel dissonance. It doesn't
feel right. We feel really uncomfortable. And so do you
know what a lot of people do. They sabotage healthy
relationships just to get out of that dissonance that they're feeling.
(25:13):
So here's what I want you to understand in order
for you to grow in recovery and get healthy you're
going to fight cognitive dissonance. And I'll come back to
that in just a minute. Let me give you a
six thing that can result in us creating what we hate,
(25:34):
and that is we wrongly diagnose why we got hurt
in the first place, and then we come up with
the wrong solution so that we never get hurt again.
So an example, you are disrespected as a child, and
your diagnosis is because it must have happened because I'm different,
(25:56):
I'm too emotional, I'm too sensitive.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
So the solution is to stuff all of.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
That down and wear masks all the time and become
a people pleaser. That way, I'll never get disrespected again.
So to a child, that seems logical, it seems like
the right diagnosis, and it seems like the right solution,
but it isn't. Because if you become a people pleaser
and you never say no to anybody and they can
use you and walk all over you, they may like
(26:24):
you at first, but they're going to start to disrespect
you because you don't have a backbone.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
So the very thing you were trying to prevent being.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
Disrespected you ended up creating by a wrong diagnosis and
a wrong solution. Another way that this works out is
what I call a pendulum swing. So people say, I
hate my dad. He had all kinds of anger issues,
he was a narcissist. I am not going to end
(26:54):
up with a husband like my dad. So they go
out and they look for guys that seemed totally opposite
of their dad, different personality. Maybe their dad was an extrovert.
They look for an introvert. Maybe their dad was loud
and emotional. They look for somebody quiet, and they think,
I found the opposite. But what they've missed is the
(27:17):
real reason for their dad's issues was not just his personality.
It was his shame. It was his unhealed wounds. It
was a whole bunch of deep, deep things. But they
didn't know that, and so they just look for an
opposite personality, somebody who's not an extrovert, somebody who's quiet.
But they end up with somebody with shame because they're
(27:39):
drawn to shame, that's their normal. And they end up
with somebody with a lot of shame. Even though he's
an introvert, he's still got anger issues. So the pendulum swing,
you think you're getting the opposite, you think you're guaranteeing
you're not even get close to being like your dad.
You misdiagnosed it though. Another example conflict. So let's say
(28:04):
you grew up with tons of conflict. Conflict was never resolved,
Conflict always resulted in people getting hurt, and you said,
I hate conflict. I never want conflict in my relationships today,
So I will.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Become a people pleaser. I will never rock the boat.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
I will always be the one that makes sacrifices and
give in. I will sweep things under the carpet and
avoid talking about problem type situations. And you think that
will guarantee that I'll never have conflict, But it's a misdiagnosis.
The way to avoid conflict is to resolve it when
(28:45):
it happens and learn from it.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
What you're doing by people pleasing, never rocking the.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Boat, you're just piling up unresolved issues, and they keep
piling up, piling up, until there's ongoing tension, ongoing irritability,
and then there's an explosion. So the very thing you're
trying to avoid, because you misdiagnosed and you came up
the wrong solution, you ended up creating. Let me give
(29:15):
you one more example in this area. So let's say
that a girl was sexually abused. In her mind, she
doesn't understand how it's affected her. She doesn't understand all
of the underlying dynamics. Okay, so she just goes through life,
never wanting to be sexually abused again. But what are
(29:40):
her deep needs that she's not aware of. She is
a deep need for love, a deep need for validation,
a deep need to feel value. But she didn't get
that from her parents, and she didn't realize how that
affected her. But she was a very pretty girl, and
she found she got lots of validation for her body,
(30:02):
for her looks, and she liked that. It made her
feel good. It was seemed to be meeting these needs.
So now when she starts meeting guys, they're giving her
tons of validation and she's chasing that and she's going
after guy after guy looking for that validation.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
And what ends up She gets raped.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
She gets abused again because she misdiagnosed what was really
causing all of her problems. Another one that can contribute
to this creating what we hate is what we call
a self fulfilling prophecy. So we have an experience, we
(30:45):
create beliefs, and then We predict what we think will
happen based on our experience and our beliefs. We create expectations.
So in a healthy family, you end up with a
whole bunch of things that if you're authentic, you connect.
That becomes your belief system, and you expect, if you're authentic,
you will connect in the future. What you need to
(31:07):
understand is complex trauma your experiences. If you're authentic, you
get rejected. It creates a set of beliefs that you
think are true, but they are lies. And so what
you then do is say, Okay, the way to get
accepted is to never be authentic. So you go into
all your relations ships expecting that if I'm ever authentic,
(31:30):
I will get rejected. And guess what happens. You go
into relationships, you wear masks, you wear walls, You might
let a little bit of yourself out, and people start
rejecting you because you're fake. And then you go seek
I tried, and I got rejected. You created what you
(31:51):
were trying to avoid. Let me give you another example.
A young girl, and this is based on a true story.
Whenever she gave her opinion, whenever she asked a question,
whenever she expressed a need to her parents, she was punished,
She was made to feel selfish, she was made to
feel bad. So giving her opinion, expressing a need, sharing
(32:15):
always resulted in something bad. So she decided to shut down,
to not have any needs, to never express a need.
That she was just this invisible child. She went to school,
and she had a new school teacher. And this school
(32:35):
teacher had a real desire to form an emotional connection
with each child. She was warm, she was accepting, she
was safe. She reached out each child to understand them,
to find out what interested them, to connect with them.
But this young girl, no way, if I expressed myself,
(32:57):
if I open up, if I share, I will get rejected.
So she would not give into this teacher. For months,
the teacher tried to connect with this child. She was
able to connect with all the other children in the class,
but this one child held out, would not open up,
would not warm up. So after several months, the teacher
(33:20):
finally gave up and just said, Okay, this child will
not let me in.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
I will not try.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
To push any further. And guess how that child interpreted that. See,
everybody rejects you, That's just the way life is that
just confirms my belief that everybody will ultimately reject you.
And so she became even more determined to never open
(33:49):
up again. Many of you grew up with people can
be trusted, people will let you down, and so your
belief is when you get in a relationship, they're going
to eventually let me down. But you go into a
relationship and you're super needy, and you start phoning the
person in the middle of the night. You start asking
(34:11):
if they can meet for coffee, and you just push
boundaries and you demand and you demand and you demand,
and you basically want the person to respond to you
perfectly every time and be available twenty four to seven.
And finally the person says, I can't do this and
set some boundaries, and then you go, see, people let
me down. I shouldn't have trusted this person. You created
(34:37):
a self fulfilling prophecy. You were controlled by a lie.
And somebody has said this, a lie can only control
a person if they continue.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
To believe it.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Somebody else has said, if you expect the battle to
be insurmountable, which would be a lie, you have met
the enemy, which is you for believing that line. Okay,
how do we heal this, how do we change? How
do we stop creating what we're trying to avoid. Let
(35:11):
me just give you a few practical things. So number one,
in light of what we said earlier, you have to
fight cognitive dissonance. You have to realize that your conscience
has been programmed with lies and unhealthy things that you
were told were healthy. So now for you to try
(35:32):
and get healthy is going to create dissonance. It's going
to create uncomfortable feelings, and those can make you feel guilty.
They can make you second guess yourself. They can make
you feel confused. Am I doing the right thing because
it feels wrong? But that's what you have to go
through in recovery. Until you retrain your conscience, you have
(35:55):
to fight through cognitive dissonance. Now, be aware that if
you have a family still in your life and you
start to get healthy, guess what, they are going to
go back to the unhealthy and say you're wrong, you
shouldn't be doing that, and they're going to create even
greater cognitive dissonance. So you're not just fighting your own
(36:18):
internal conscience that's been mistrained, You're fighting external voices that
are telling you lies.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
So be aware of that.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
Secondly, be aware of the lies you believe, be aware
of the patterns that you have, and then begin to
work on all of the shame, because the shame is
often underneath so many of our behaviors, and it's often
(36:49):
the thing that we don't see when we try to
diagnose why we do what we do. So begin to
understand the depth of your shame, how it has affected you,
so that you can heal those things, and then.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Learn about all the other deeper issues.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Shame, abandonment, deep losses, Understand how they've affected you, neglect
abuse so that you can find healthy solutions and you
can make a healthy diagnosis. That is so important. And
again I would encourage you, if you want more understanding,
(37:30):
to take our LIFT course or our REACT program that
will help you understand these things at a deeper level.
And finally, you need safe people. The very reason you
didn't want that part of your life anymore, the reason
you hate it, is because unsafe people did stuff to you.
(37:51):
They abandon you, they rejected you, they disrespected you. All
of those things that you're trying to avoid were created
by unsafe people. If you go back to unsafe people today,
you're going to end up getting hurt again.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
You need to go to safe people.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
You need to begin to have people where you can
reprogram your belief system because now you're going to get
a different result. Well that's the end of part one.
I just hope that helps you in your journey of
wanting to begin to get healthy and not keep repeating
stuff you're trying to avoid.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Thank you for joining us on the Time with Tim podcast.
If you'd like to share your own experiences or have questions,
feel free to email us at podcasts at Tim Fletcher
dot CAA. Want to learn more about complex trauma, subscribe
to Tim Fletcher's YouTube channel for past lectures and is
Friday Night Tim Talks. You can also connect with us
(38:58):
on Instagram, Facebook, link in, and TikTok. Looking for more support,
we offer programs and courses to help with healing complex
trauma and recovering from addictions. Visit Tim Fletcher dot ca
a to learn more or send us an inquiry. We're
here to support you until we meet again. Take care
(39:18):
and thank you for letting us be a part of
your healing journey.
Welcome. I'm Andy Carlson and you're listening to the Time
with Tim podcast. Today we're sharing one of Tim's insightful talks,
originally published on YouTube. Whether this is your first time
or you've been with us for a while, we hope
this lecture inspires reflection and offers helpful tools for your journey.
Let's take this time to learn together.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to another Friday Night.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
We've been going through a series where we're taking a
deeper look at the sixty characteristics of complex trauma, and
today we come to one that we call People from
complex trauma create what they hate, or they create what
they're trying to avoid, or they create the opposite of
what they want to happen. And it happens all the time.
(00:54):
And a common question is why do I do that?
So before I answer that, let me just kind of
set the stage by painting this back drop. People from
complex trauma grew up in environments where there's lots of danger,
or where their needs aren't met, or where there's many
(01:15):
violations of love. So there's lying, there's abuse, there isn't justice.
All of those things are happening, and they hate that
aspect of their childhood and they never want to see
that happen in their life again. They want their needs met,
et cetera. And so they start out with a determination,
(01:38):
I'm never going to be abandoned again. I'm never going
to be disrespected again. I'm never going to be lied
to again. And then they move into adult life and
they end up being abandoned again and disrespected again, and
it happens over and over. So they create, without realizing it,
the very environment that it ends up creating what they've
(02:01):
been trying to avoid, or the thing that they hate.
So let me give you a couple examples just to
help you understand it. So somebody that's been abandoned goes,
that is the worst emotional experience to go through. Being
abandoned makes you feel like you don't matter at all.
I never want that to happen again. So they get
(02:23):
in a relationship determine that they'll never be abandoned. But
what they then do is they're super needy, or they
test the person all the time, or they try to
control the person all the time, and after a while,
the other person goes, I'm done with this, and they
walk out of the relationship and the person feels abandoned again.
(02:43):
Or I've had so many people say to me, I
grew up and I said, I'm never going to be
like my dad. My dad was an addict. My dad
had anger issues. My dad was in jail periodically, and
they are determined not to become their dad. And when
they hit at a life, they're an attict there in
jail and they.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Got anger issues.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Or I don't want a husband like my last husband,
so I'm going to find a new husband who's not
going to be like my last husband. And they date
and they end up married to somebody that they think
is totally opposite of their last husband, and then they
find out he's very much like their last husband. Or
(03:27):
I don't want my kids to make the same bad
decisions that I made, And so they start out in
parenting to try to make sure their kids don't repeat
their mistakes, and they find out fifteen twenty years later
that their kids have made the same decisions that they
made when they were a teenager. They created what they
(03:50):
were trying to avoid, what they hate. They created the
opposite of what they wanted. So why is that, Well,
let me give you some reasons, because there's many different
factors that can come to play on why we create
what we hate. So the first one is a hyper need.
(04:15):
So when a need is not met in a child,
they can go in two different directions extremes. They can
try to shut that need off and we'll get back
to that in a minute, or it can create a
hyper need. I need it, I want it, I want it,
I want it. And so let me give you a
couple examples. Let's say a child was not validated and
(04:38):
we all have a need to be validated, and so
when they come to their teen years in adult life,
they have this hyper need of wanting to be validated,
so they chase people around. Was I good enough? Was
I good enough? They're always looking for applause, for pats
on the back.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
And what happens with that.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Hyper need, people get tired of having that person always
looking for validation and they stop giving them validation. So
the child has a hyper need for validation because they
never got it as a child.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
But what they end up is creating is nobody wants to.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Give them validation exactly what happened when they were a child.
Or let's say a person who was never heard whenever
they tried to explain or give their opinion. Nobody listened
to them, so now they're going, I need to be
listened to. So whenever they're in a conversation, they overtalk,
they over explain, they talk too much, they butt in
(05:38):
to get heard, and after a while people go, enough
with this person, I'm not even listening to them, So
now they're not heard again. They created what they are
trying to avoid, or a person who was never understood.
Nobody took the time to understand where they're coming from,
so that hurts, and now today they go, I need
(06:00):
to be understood, and so now they over explain everything.
Whenever they think somebody doesn't understand them, they chase them arounsing,
let me explain them, explain them, explain, and pretty soon
people are tired of that, and so now they end
up not being understood again because nobody wants to listen
to their never ending explanations. Or let's say a child
(06:23):
was made to feel stupid all the time, so now
they think, the thing that I need to do in
order to not be perceived as stupid is to give
very academic answers to share my opinion all the time.
But after a while people go I'm tired of listening
to this person and they get treated as if they're
(06:45):
stupid again. So that can happen over and over. So
those that hyper need situation can set a person up
to not get that need met exactly what happened when
they were a child. But then there's another part to
(07:05):
this need thing. So sometimes when you shut that need off,
you don't even think it's a need, and you just
think you have other needs. But you don't understand that
that deep, deep need trumps all of the lesser needs
in your life. So let me give you example. Let's
(07:26):
say that you were rejected and abandoned. That hurts like crazy,
but you just shut that off and you basically went to,
I don't need people, I don't care about people. I'm
going to isolate, I'm never going to let people see
the real me. I am going to wear masks, I
(07:48):
am going to put up walls so that nobody can
get close enough to hurt me again. And so you
think my need is to be self sufficient. My need
is to be liked by people, and to wear masks
and to have walls and not be authentic.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
All of those things, those are my needs.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
But you don't understand that your deep, deep need is
to connect, to be authentic, and so.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
You live in isolation.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
But now you feel a deep loneliness, a deep longing
to be loved.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Those two deep needs.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Of connection and love are not being met by your
solution to never being rejected or abandoned again, and that
desire to be loved will cause you to seek out relationships.
It will cause you to misread flags in relationships and
get into relationships with unsafe people, and before you know what,
(08:47):
you're getting hurt and abandoned and rejected again. So not
understanding the deep, deep needs of the human being, needs
that many have turned off because of early wounds, those
still will ultimately trump everything else. Another one that I
(09:08):
see all the time is a person who grows up
with a family where they're constantly shamed, made to feel
like they don't matter, like they're stupid, et cetera. And
so they go need I don't need that validation, I
don't need all these different needs met. But what they
don't realize is they have this deep, deep longing to
(09:31):
be validated by their family, deep deep longing to be
accepted and to belong by their family, And so they
go into recovery, and they think all my needs are
is I need to make a few friends, I need
to do my recovery work. But they don't understand how
(09:52):
deep the longing is for their family to validate them
and accept them. And they keep running back to their
family for validation, and they keep getting shamed. The very
thing they don't want they ended up creating because they
didn't understand that deep need. Now there's another need kind
(10:12):
of variable here that is important to understand. In the
case of sexual abuse. For a young child, it awakens
a drive before kind of the plan time, the natural
time when it would be awakened. So the sex drive
normally awakens eleven twelve years old. But let's say a
(10:36):
child's molested at five or six. What can happen when
you have that drive awaken before the plan time is again,
a child go in two different directions. They just hate sex,
turn it off it's a dirty, bad thing. Or they
(10:56):
can have a hyper sex drive and they can become promiscuous.
But what happened to that little child was I never
want to be molested again. I never want to be
sexually abused again.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
I hate it.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
But then because they end up with this hyper sex
drive and they're promiscuous all the time.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Guess what happens.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
They end up in situations where they get sexually abused. Again,
they created what they were trying to avoid without even
realizing it. Now, there's another reason why people create what
they hate, and that is because they turned off their intuition,
(11:41):
their radar system, their gut.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
So for the.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Question I get asked all the time, is people from
trauma end up with more trauma in their adult life
than people from healthy homes who don't have childhood trauma.
Why is it that people from trauma end up with
more trauma? And I think often it's around this radar system.
(12:08):
So consider this scenario. A child is going to be
going to their uncles or to their babysitters, and their
gut says that person is not safe. They tell their parents,
I don't feel comfortable with that babysitter, I don't feel
comfortable with my uncle.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
They're listening to their gut.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
But their parents says, oh, there's nothing wrong with them.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Go ahead, and they go and they get molested.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
What they then do is tell their parents and their
parents as you're making it up, no, that really didn't happen. Oh,
it's your fault, whatever, and they get sent to that
uncle or that babysitter again. So what the child realizes
is my radar system, which is designed to warn me
(12:58):
to go get away from that person. I am not
able to get away from that person because I'm a
child and I have parents who are forcing me to
go to that person. So why do I want to
radar system when I can't listen to it? It's just
an annoying They have sirens going off when I can't
listen to them. So they shut down their alarm system,
(13:23):
their gut, their intuition because there's no point in having
it and it's annoying. So now they get to adult
life and they're going out on a date and their
alarm system says red flags, red flags, danger, danger, but
they've turned it off and they just walk into danger
(13:45):
now and get traumatized again. The third reason why people
create what they hate or end up in situations that
they've been trying to avoid is because of their default
setting that they developed as a child. What was their
(14:07):
normal as a child. So, for example, a child grows
up with a narcissist dad or a narcissist.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Mom, and what happens with that is.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
They hate that narcissist dad, they hate that narcisst mum,
but that's their normal, that's all they know. That's how
they've learned to relate to people.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
And that's their life.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
And so without realizing it, they go into adult life
hating narcissists but feeling the most comfortable with narcissists, being
drawn to narcissist because it feels normal, and ending up
back in the exact situation they hated when they were
a child, or many grew up in homes where they
(14:58):
were disrespected, made fun of, put down. They hated that,
but it was their normal, and so now they're drawn
into situations in other relationships with people who realize I
can put this person down and get away with it,
and the person just takes it because that's their normal.
(15:21):
It feels normal. So they end up in situations much
like their childhood just because that's where their comfort zone is.
So if you consider the fact that a child growing
up in complex trauma could be growing up with hundreds
of unhealthy family dynamics, relationship dynamics, coping dynamics, but they
(15:46):
don't know they're unhealthy because it's their normal, and so
now they go into adult life and they gravitate to
what feels normal. There's a fourth one I think is
so important to understand, and it's to understand the power
of a parent's influence.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
We often think.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
That we are deeply influenced by what our parents say
to us and do to us, or do their actions
and their words, and those are the two things only
that influence us. But do you realize that you are
also influenced by who your parent is, by their beliefs,
(16:30):
by their values, by their attitudes, by their fears, by
their emotional makeup, by their coping, by their thinking. All
of those things you're picking up you're affected by, you're
influenced by without even realizing it. And so your child,
(16:54):
your parents are like this greenhouse, that incubator that puts
all of this influence on you, and it shapes you,
informs you without you even realizing it. And so those
things you just pick up, they become your normal, They
become your autopilot. You learn to cope with like your
(17:17):
parents did without even realizing it. You respond to stress
like your parents did without even realizing it. You develop
attitudes that your parents have without even realizing it the
power of a parent's influence. I can hate what they
did and hate what they said, but then I end
up like them because I picked up all of their
(17:39):
ways of thinking and coping their values and beliefs.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
That is a.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Very hard thing to accept, but it shows the power
of parents influence.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
And let me take that further. We often when we
think of pro.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Creation, think of creating a physical baby. We're going to
create physical life, so we think of pro creation in
terms of physical life only. But think of it also
that in pro creation, I'm not just creating a physical life.
I'm creating a soul. I'm creating a human being, a soul.
(18:23):
Think about that. It's really easy to create a physical life.
But do you realize it's easy to create an unhealthy soul,
but very hard to create a healthy soul.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Take it further.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
I can create a physical life just by one act,
but to create a healthy physical soul takes years of
consistent being healthy, influencing them, modeling for them, responding to
them in healthy ways.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
It takes years to create a healthy soul.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
One act to create a physical life and easy to
create an unhealthy soul. Take it further, to create a
physical life requires only an action. To create a healthy
soul requires words, actions and who I am, my attitudes,
(19:27):
my responses. If I am healthy, I can create a
healthy soul. If I am not healthy, I cannot create
a healthy soul. I will create an unhealthy soul. So
pro creation is more than just giving physical life passing
on my genes. It's creating a soul who's like my soul.
(19:52):
And so if I am going to pass on healthy,
I have to be healthy. So here's one of the
hard things I think for people to face when we.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Look at create what we hate.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
We often think of create what we hate only in
terms of doing it in my own life. But what
I want you to see is we create what we
hate not just in our own life, but also in
our children, because if I don't get healthy myself, I
will just pass on unhealthiness and they will be like
me and like their grandparents, who I hated and didn't
(20:30):
want to be like. That is a hard reality, but
that is what happens. Creating what we hate becomes a
generational thing if we don't stop the cycle by becoming
healthy ourself. Let me give you a fifth reason why
we create what we hate and it's called cognitive dissonance.
(20:54):
So cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort we feel when
our mind entertains two contradictory concepts at the same time.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
So let me give you kind of an example of this.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
There's what I refer to as healthy cognitive dissonance. It's
designed as a good thing. So you have a healthy
belief that lying is wrong, that stealing is wrong, that
is drilled into you, that trains your conscience. Now you
(21:31):
consider stealing from someone and lying to someone, and all
of a sudden, you have two contradictory things happening inside
of you, and it creates this discomfort. I don't like
what I'm feeling right now. There's this dissonance inside of me.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Now that was designed to be a.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Good thing, because what it is saying is if I
program my conscience with healthy, whenever I try to become unhealthy,
there will be dissonance which will motivate me to not
do the unhealthy, to say, I don't like how this
makes me feel, so I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
That's the healthy design.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
But now enter complex trauma, So two different scenarios. What
happens in complex trauma is a child has to do
unhealthy tools in order to survive, so they can be
told lying is bad, but in order to get unjustly punished,
(22:34):
they got to lie about a lot of things to survive.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
So their conscience has been trained to not lie.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
But they have to lie to survive, so they just
harden their conscience. They shut it up. They don't want
it chirping at them, so that can happen. Secondly, you
can get a conscience that's mistrained by wrong beliefs. Your
family can say to you you should never say no.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
You need to please people all the time.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Love is never saying no to anybody, and they drill
that into you, and when you try to say no
at times you get punished for that, and so it's
trained into you that never say no. But then you
come into recovery and you realize that love says no.
(23:33):
Love sets boundaries. There are times when it is right
to say no.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
But what does that feel like? Now? Inside your brain?
Speaker 3 (23:44):
It is healthy, is contradicting what you were raised with.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
You didn't know it was unhealthy.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
But now when you want to get healthy, now you're
you got dissonance, cognitive dissonance inside you. It doesn't feel
good to now start saying no, You now feel guilty.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
You now feel all kinds of unrest inside of you.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
And so complex trauma creates a belief system of lies,
so that now when you want to choose the truth,
it creates cognitive dissonance. Complex trauma mistrains your conscience. So
now when you want to act in healthy ways, you
feel cognitive dissonance. So you've got to fight against that.
(24:28):
So let me give you another example. Let's say your
experience and what your family taught you is you can't
trust anybody. People can't be trusted, and that was drilled
into you, and your experience seemed to confirm it. Now
you come into recovery and you go, I like this person.
I see that I need people in my life I
(24:50):
need to trust. Now, when you go I think I'm
going to trust this person, you feel dissonance. It doesn't
feel right. We feel really uncomfortable. And so do you
know what a lot of people do. They sabotage healthy
relationships just to get out of that dissonance that they're feeling.
(25:13):
So here's what I want you to understand in order
for you to grow in recovery and get healthy you're
going to fight cognitive dissonance. And I'll come back to
that in just a minute. Let me give you a
six thing that can result in us creating what we hate,
(25:34):
and that is we wrongly diagnose why we got hurt
in the first place, and then we come up with
the wrong solution so that we never get hurt again.
So an example, you are disrespected as a child, and
your diagnosis is because it must have happened because I'm different,
(25:56):
I'm too emotional, I'm too sensitive.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
So the solution is to stuff all of.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
That down and wear masks all the time and become
a people pleaser. That way, I'll never get disrespected again.
So to a child, that seems logical, it seems like
the right diagnosis, and it seems like the right solution,
but it isn't. Because if you become a people pleaser
and you never say no to anybody and they can
use you and walk all over you, they may like
(26:24):
you at first, but they're going to start to disrespect
you because you don't have a backbone.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
So the very thing you were trying to prevent being.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
Disrespected you ended up creating by a wrong diagnosis and
a wrong solution. Another way that this works out is
what I call a pendulum swing. So people say, I
hate my dad. He had all kinds of anger issues,
he was a narcissist. I am not going to end
(26:54):
up with a husband like my dad. So they go
out and they look for guys that seemed totally opposite
of their dad, different personality. Maybe their dad was an extrovert.
They look for an introvert. Maybe their dad was loud
and emotional. They look for somebody quiet, and they think,
I found the opposite. But what they've missed is the
(27:17):
real reason for their dad's issues was not just his personality.
It was his shame. It was his unhealed wounds. It
was a whole bunch of deep, deep things. But they
didn't know that, and so they just look for an
opposite personality, somebody who's not an extrovert, somebody who's quiet.
But they end up with somebody with shame because they're
(27:39):
drawn to shame, that's their normal. And they end up
with somebody with a lot of shame. Even though he's
an introvert, he's still got anger issues. So the pendulum swing,
you think you're getting the opposite, you think you're guaranteeing
you're not even get close to being like your dad.
You misdiagnosed it though. Another example conflict. So let's say
(28:04):
you grew up with tons of conflict. Conflict was never resolved,
Conflict always resulted in people getting hurt, and you said,
I hate conflict. I never want conflict in my relationships today,
So I will.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Become a people pleaser. I will never rock the boat.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
I will always be the one that makes sacrifices and
give in. I will sweep things under the carpet and
avoid talking about problem type situations. And you think that
will guarantee that I'll never have conflict, But it's a misdiagnosis.
The way to avoid conflict is to resolve it when
(28:45):
it happens and learn from it.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
What you're doing by people pleasing, never rocking the.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Boat, you're just piling up unresolved issues, and they keep
piling up, piling up, until there's ongoing tension, ongoing irritability,
and then there's an explosion. So the very thing you're
trying to avoid, because you misdiagnosed and you came up
the wrong solution, you ended up creating. Let me give
(29:15):
you one more example in this area. So let's say
that a girl was sexually abused. In her mind, she
doesn't understand how it's affected her. She doesn't understand all
of the underlying dynamics. Okay, so she just goes through life,
never wanting to be sexually abused again. But what are
(29:40):
her deep needs that she's not aware of. She is
a deep need for love, a deep need for validation,
a deep need to feel value. But she didn't get
that from her parents, and she didn't realize how that
affected her. But she was a very pretty girl, and
she found she got lots of validation for her body,
(30:02):
for her looks, and she liked that. It made her
feel good. It was seemed to be meeting these needs.
So now when she starts meeting guys, they're giving her
tons of validation and she's chasing that and she's going
after guy after guy looking for that validation.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
And what ends up She gets raped.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
She gets abused again because she misdiagnosed what was really
causing all of her problems. Another one that can contribute
to this creating what we hate is what we call
a self fulfilling prophecy. So we have an experience, we
(30:45):
create beliefs, and then We predict what we think will
happen based on our experience and our beliefs. We create expectations.
So in a healthy family, you end up with a
whole bunch of things that if you're authentic, you connect.
That becomes your belief system, and you expect, if you're authentic,
you will connect in the future. What you need to
(31:07):
understand is complex trauma your experiences. If you're authentic, you
get rejected. It creates a set of beliefs that you
think are true, but they are lies. And so what
you then do is say, Okay, the way to get
accepted is to never be authentic. So you go into
all your relations ships expecting that if I'm ever authentic,
(31:30):
I will get rejected. And guess what happens. You go
into relationships, you wear masks, you wear walls, You might
let a little bit of yourself out, and people start
rejecting you because you're fake. And then you go seek
I tried, and I got rejected. You created what you
(31:51):
were trying to avoid. Let me give you another example.
A young girl, and this is based on a true story.
Whenever she gave her opinion, whenever she asked a question,
whenever she expressed a need to her parents, she was punished,
She was made to feel selfish, she was made to
feel bad. So giving her opinion, expressing a need, sharing
(32:15):
always resulted in something bad. So she decided to shut down,
to not have any needs, to never express a need.
That she was just this invisible child. She went to school,
and she had a new school teacher. And this school
(32:35):
teacher had a real desire to form an emotional connection
with each child. She was warm, she was accepting, she
was safe. She reached out each child to understand them,
to find out what interested them, to connect with them.
But this young girl, no way, if I expressed myself,
(32:57):
if I open up, if I share, I will get rejected.
So she would not give into this teacher. For months,
the teacher tried to connect with this child. She was
able to connect with all the other children in the class,
but this one child held out, would not open up,
would not warm up. So after several months, the teacher
(33:20):
finally gave up and just said, Okay, this child will
not let me in.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
I will not try.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
To push any further. And guess how that child interpreted that. See,
everybody rejects you, That's just the way life is that
just confirms my belief that everybody will ultimately reject you.
And so she became even more determined to never open
(33:49):
up again. Many of you grew up with people can
be trusted, people will let you down, and so your
belief is when you get in a relationship, they're going
to eventually let me down. But you go into a
relationship and you're super needy, and you start phoning the
person in the middle of the night. You start asking
(34:11):
if they can meet for coffee, and you just push
boundaries and you demand and you demand and you demand,
and you basically want the person to respond to you
perfectly every time and be available twenty four to seven.
And finally the person says, I can't do this and
set some boundaries, and then you go, see, people let
me down. I shouldn't have trusted this person. You created
(34:37):
a self fulfilling prophecy. You were controlled by a lie.
And somebody has said this, a lie can only control
a person if they continue.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
To believe it.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Somebody else has said, if you expect the battle to
be insurmountable, which would be a lie, you have met
the enemy, which is you for believing that line. Okay,
how do we heal this, how do we change? How
do we stop creating what we're trying to avoid. Let
(35:11):
me just give you a few practical things. So number one,
in light of what we said earlier, you have to
fight cognitive dissonance. You have to realize that your conscience
has been programmed with lies and unhealthy things that you
were told were healthy. So now for you to try
(35:32):
and get healthy is going to create dissonance. It's going
to create uncomfortable feelings, and those can make you feel guilty.
They can make you second guess yourself. They can make
you feel confused. Am I doing the right thing because
it feels wrong? But that's what you have to go
through in recovery. Until you retrain your conscience, you have
(35:55):
to fight through cognitive dissonance. Now, be aware that if
you have a family still in your life and you
start to get healthy, guess what, they are going to
go back to the unhealthy and say you're wrong, you
shouldn't be doing that, and they're going to create even
greater cognitive dissonance. So you're not just fighting your own
(36:18):
internal conscience that's been mistrained, You're fighting external voices that
are telling you lies.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
So be aware of that.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
Secondly, be aware of the lies you believe, be aware
of the patterns that you have, and then begin to
work on all of the shame, because the shame is
often underneath so many of our behaviors, and it's often
(36:49):
the thing that we don't see when we try to
diagnose why we do what we do. So begin to
understand the depth of your shame, how it has affected you,
so that you can heal those things, and then.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Learn about all the other deeper issues.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Shame, abandonment, deep losses, Understand how they've affected you, neglect
abuse so that you can find healthy solutions and you
can make a healthy diagnosis. That is so important. And
again I would encourage you, if you want more understanding,
(37:30):
to take our LIFT course or our REACT program that
will help you understand these things at a deeper level.
And finally, you need safe people. The very reason you
didn't want that part of your life anymore, the reason
you hate it, is because unsafe people did stuff to you.
(37:51):
They abandon you, they rejected you, they disrespected you. All
of those things that you're trying to avoid were created
by unsafe people. If you go back to unsafe people today,
you're going to end up getting hurt again.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
You need to go to safe people.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
You need to begin to have people where you can
reprogram your belief system because now you're going to get
a different result. Well that's the end of part one.
I just hope that helps you in your journey of
wanting to begin to get healthy and not keep repeating
stuff you're trying to avoid.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Thank you for joining us on the Time with Tim podcast.
If you'd like to share your own experiences or have questions,
feel free to email us at podcasts at Tim Fletcher
dot CAA. Want to learn more about complex trauma, subscribe
to Tim Fletcher's YouTube channel for past lectures and is
Friday Night Tim Talks. You can also connect with us
(38:58):
on Instagram, Facebook, link in, and TikTok. Looking for more support,
we offer programs and courses to help with healing complex
trauma and recovering from addictions. Visit Tim Fletcher dot ca
a to learn more or send us an inquiry. We're
here to support you until we meet again. Take care
(39:18):
and thank you for letting us be a part of
your healing journey.
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