I have a message for everyone who like me grew up with abuse and neglect to fully become ourselves now we can't let that traumatic past keep pressing us down so that we can conform and stay invisible and play small you had a hundred reasons not to shine when you were younger as a kid growing up with the dysfunction all around you you may not have had the support or even the permission to be extraordinary to be gifted to be your unique and quirky self right now is the time when you get to decide whether you
will rise up onto the path of real healing and become your full and real self or whether you need to take the so-called easy path which in the short run is easier because it doesn't take a lot of courage or effort but it does require that you continue your self-suppression and that you tolerate the empty and depressed feeling that playing small always demands that is the price you pay I'm here to tell you from my own experience that recovering from the effects of trauma in my childhood healing it is the easy Road it sounds scary
and hard but the hardest Road of all is when you don't heal your past when you don't find a way of calming those intense triggers and you have to keep your life very tightly controlled and isolated tiptoeing around all your own reactions well why do you have to to do that because you think that if you don't control it life is going to break you and I want to show you how to not break how to open up a little at a time to experiences like friendships and romantic relationships and doing your best ever on
a job and trying new things that used to be too triggering for you to take on and I want to give you the real tools to make that possible for yourself to get out of small and get into the big beautiful life that you really want so to stop instinctively protecting yourself let's look at what's really going on when you play small the first thing is if if you're like just about everybody with complex PTSD people are triggering and sometimes they're so triggering that you end up cutting them off and removing yourself from opportunities just
because you're afraid of how you're going to feel when you put yourself out there a little bit that feeling that rises up that you don't trust yourself to handle when you're triggered and there's a little sequence that happens when you're triggered in your nervous system and this includes your brain and your body and your emotions and when I say triggered I'm not talking about feelings necessary not the way that some people use that word I'm talking about a stimulus that activates disregulation in your nervous system and if you watch my videos you know I talk
about disregulation a lot and how to get re-regulated you might not even be aware that your nervous system is getting out of sync when people criticize you or yell at you or you're in a frantic hurry or a big noise goes off and it startles you you don't even feel most of the aspects of disregulation but the part you can feel feels like discombobulation or numbness or being flustered your emotions might suddenly run really high when you're disregulated and you maybe always thought that it was just you maybe you're just a bad person and you
felt ashamed for the way that you get under stress that attack on yourself by the way can be even more disregulated than the original trigger so let's let's just say you're hanging out at work and somebody says something you know they praise somebody else where you should have gotten half the credit that's a common trigger certainly used to get me still could getting overlooked so let's just take the work example a trigger comes up so cortisol surges in your bloodstream adrenaline starts flowing you can feel it almost running down your arms does that happen to
you it's like you've been injected with a like a reaction and your brain starts to disregulated in the pattern that happens to people who went through abuse and neglect when they were kids reasoning goes down emotions go up and next thing you know an emotional statement comes flying out of your mouth completely unregulated not a good idea and whatever you blurt it out causes damage on the job this used to happen to me I didn't know then what the cause was or why I would do something so self-sabotaging you realize it later right but at
the time it feels necessary it feels like you have to say this thing the strong criticism or standing up for yourself but it comes out too harshly you can see other people kind of flinch when you say it and then what happens oh the shame remorse hiding fear and there were times when I would just say things and the way I sounded when I said that it made me afraid to ever speak up and I learned to keep my mouth shut I'd make small talk but when I had a strong opinion or just or disagreed
or needed to say something to defend myself I just wouldn't I'd keep my ideas to myself I'd let things that were unfair or untrue just go by and not say anything and I didn't do things like ask for a raise or make a case to my boss to let me try new things that I wanted to learn and all of this was because I was in the habit of fearing how intense I would get when I expressed myself especially when the stakes were high or when there were some hurt feelings buried inside the reason I
was asking to be recognized I now know this silence in crucial moments is normal for people with complex PTSD and if you went through abuse and neglect as a kid it's a normal reaction when you're stressed to get a little disregulated when you speak up it's a trigger really speaking up courageously if it comes out with a bit of an edge like a little angry or a little bit weepy in the throat what you can do is learn to stay more regulated in those situations and you will have awkward moments in your life and sometimes
you might have to apologize for your tone of voice it's part of it but all of that is a tiny price to pay when you compare it to avoiding the problem altogether by withdrawing from your life and saying nothing so that's a form of playing small now a second way that you might be playing small is staying stuck in blame and I first just want to say the people who are AB who abused you are in fact to blame for what they did to you it's not your fault and it's good that you're healing from
any idea that you may have internalized that it was your fault that you caused this somehow or you deserved it the people who hurt you they are to blame for hurting you there's just no question there but right now they can't do anything about the past and it's rare that abusers even try but remember even if they admitted everything and did everything they could they couldn't do anything about the past the damage has been done your brain has sustained that injury of abuse and neglect now it's you who needs to start healing that and it's
you who's been suffering from having a disregulated nervous system for so much of your life and it's been affecting your behavior and your choices so now it's you who can heal that and start to change how this plays out from now on when you believe that the problem that needs solving is the past you give away all your power trying to change something that cannot be changed by its nature the people who hurt you can't change the past and you can't change the past and that is why I encourage you to take your focus off
the people who hurt you even though they are to blame you can step away from focusing on them not because they didn't hurt you but because you need to get that power back into yourself so that you can start using all that energy for changing your life right now for noticing where you see cptsd is affecting you and figuring out a strategy for how you can work around it and still succeed at the things that you are trying to do now third thing that might be a factor in you playing small is that you've grown
too foggy mentally and cognitively to take action on things even when you know the right thing to do this is also common for people who went through abuse and neglect as kids by the way that brain fog is something that people so often blame themselves for so you might be attacking yourself with the idea that you're stupid or lazy or you have ADHD and actually that that might not be true even if you were diagnosed with it it might not be true some clinical experts I trust say that sometimes ADHD is a misdiagnosis of what
is really a symptom of complex PTSD not always but it's worth noting you can ask a professional about that if you think it applies to you so when you're making a plan to to improve your life but then when you take action that brain fog comes and settles down on you it can feel like you're walking through thick GOP I've called it honey and sand you know mixed up you know if you got your feet caught in that or it's like sticky mud something thick and awful that slows you down and wears you out and
when you're feeling stuck like that it can be really hard to see clearly and move forward and sometimes just following through on a series of items on a list just feels like so much to do and then you get one thing done and then oops off into the fog you go again we all know what that's like it's a cptsd thing and in fact it's a disregulation thing and if you think that you might be struggling with disregulation you can take my quiz that is one of the free tools that I give away it's on
the free tools page of my website I believe it's linked down below all the videos in the description section too but luckily there are a lot of work around that you can use to start improving your mental acuity and one of them has to do with diet and there are many ways that you can eat in a healthy manner but it usually involves eating lightly not eating too much sugar or high high carbohydrate or fast carbohydrate very processed food people love to talk about what to eat and debate the best way and there are many
ways that you can do it but you might want to try what happens if you just cut out sugar just cut it out for a couple days and see what happens to your ability to pay attention there are a lot of things that you can do too I teach a technique for writing and releasing fearful and resentful thoughts and feelings which I consider to be the substance of trauma driven thinking and this followed by meditation is the most power powerful thing that I've found to get my focus and my sense of calm inside back these
are the techniques I call the daily practice and I I talk about them in like every video I make but there's a reason for that it's the most important thing I ever did to heal my own complex PTSD and it's worth a try so it's a free course I always have that link down below too in the description section or on my website on the free tools page check it out crappy childhood fairy.com I've been doing these techniques now for 30 years but before that time when the trauma was really bad I remember telling people
you know I used to be really smart and in the past you know before I don't know in my teens and 20s I had always been sharp I was a good writer I was good at crossword puzzles and I got good grades in school but the more adult trauma that happened which is what tends to happen if you had childhood trauma you know you end up kind of getting lost my ability to do math in my head and uh to write complicated ideas in a way that made sense to whoever was reading my work and
I'd lose my train of thought like all the time I just lose it in the middle couldn't remember words or what was on my calendar and this held back my confidence about trying for big goals in my life or um you know raising my hand with uh I have an idea I wouldn't do it because I just didn't trust myself the little things in my life had me constantly overwhelmed but what happened is when I learned to reregulate my brain and my emotions and my nervous system by using the writing and meditation techniques in the
daily practice I reckoned that I recovered about 30 IQ points I didn't measure who knows but I really changed it was this tremendous boost in mental ability that showed up every day and it I now keep using the techniques to strengthen that level of inner calm and alert awareness it's in that state that I have access to my natural intelligence and my best ideas I was born with this intelligence and you were too when your natural intelligence and awareness is suppressed and fogged out by trauma it's a huge limitation on how far you can go
in life it's almost as if you have to play small and everyone pays the price we need you right we need you giving your best you can't suppress yourself forever it's not a solution and in the end the symptoms are are going to leak out anyway you need to heal the symptoms so that your calm and focused awareness can kind of be just the the ground on which you stand you need your intelligence back it doesn't matter if you're in your 50s or your 60s or your 70s or 80s or 90s there's more mental acuity
Available to You by learning to re-regulate when your disregulation has been triggered and this is something you can learn now finally another reason that you might be playing small is because you fear other people's disapproval when you stop playing small it sometimes means expressing yourself even when it might mean stating ideas that not everybody approves of happens to me a lot that was a process I had to go through in order to start crappy childhood fairy now back when I did in 20 late 2016 was my very first blog post but it didn't start I
didn't start getting criticism till maybe 17 2017 2018 I was afraid people would say I had no right to tell other people what I was discovering about what worked now I knew about cptsd I knew about disregulation it had been published in you know good books reputable books but hardly anybody knew about it yet so I was I was on YouTube talking about it it started out very safe and I wrote a very safe and boring blog that nobody could object to and nobody did mostly because nobody bothered to read it and also you know
I used to work in public health I used to to write brochures and my early blog post sounded like one of those sappy posters on the wall at the dentist's office about happiness and motivation and stuff so gradually I learned that the only thing that really made a difference in people's lives or made them want to read what I was saying or watch my videos was me telling the truth I started talking about what it was like to be me how I felt when I used to try to tell my problems to a therapist and
what it was like when I had a breakthrough what caused that to happen what did I have to stop doing the truth about what my experience was is messy and it's a little controversial and I was always worried about getting cancelled but the blog led to the videos and the videos ended up finding you and here we are I sto playing small I do in fact get nasty comments sometimes exactly in the way I was afraid of but so many good things have come along with you know putting myself out there H you know loving
comments kind support you know people writing to me about the positive effects they're experiencing that it's totally worth it it's it's a it's a tiny price to pay you know getting a few nasty comments hate is a sign that you're saying something online you know sometimes people go oh it means you're saying something important you can say anything online and you're going to get hate back it's kind of icky like that so I don't let it stop me the work I share here has a life of its own it's bigger than me now and it's
changing me for the better as a person and I had to push it in the beginning but now it carries me along like a river I was made for this River and the river was made for me and I wake up each morning excited to keep swimming to keep finding where it takes me when you play small and you don't say anything that offends people then you can't get in the river when you begin to show up as your real self and become open about who you are and telling the truth about what you know
and believe you do take a risk what helps make that an okay risk to take is when you also cultivate a loving heart a commitment to be kind and fair and thoughtful as best you can about when and how you express yourself and to show respect for other people and their right to disagree with you now growing a sensitivity to others feelings and their dignity will gain you a lot of leeway to express how you feel nobody likes a bully nobody likes a blowhard who spouts opinions but doesn't know what they're talking about right but
you being kind and thoughtful and real is a powerful combination for opening up other people's hearts and minds and this is where good things tend to start cropping up in your life and where you can make a difference if you're in an environment where nobody speaks up your self-expression will attract attention yes there are risks but it's not as big a risk as shutting yourself down and hiding when you express yourself you might even make it safe for other people to express themselves get ready everyone benefits When groups can remain open and in robust conversation
about a mixture of points of view that's very powerful and good and how it's meant to be when you take your place among the people working to make the world better and Kinder and more supportive for those who are still struggling you're going to begin to feel the unmistakable feeling of Happiness not speaking up keeps you bottled up in yourself and this can block out trauma sure but it blocks out everything good too being yourself makes it possible to turn your focus outward to feel connection to other people to feel a sense of purpose it's
it's big it's playing big your real self might come running out like a CT that hasn't found its legs or like a little kid who gets really excited and cries sometimes have you ever seen the video uh I think it's like in Switzerland and in the springtime when the snow melts they open the barn and all the little cows come out and they're just like jumping around and you've never seen cows leap like that but they're they're so happy to be out if you had to suppress yourself as a kid your development may have been
delayed in some areas and so yes you might start out a little clumsy at times but practice will make you smoother and people may start relying on you and this can be a scary for a person with cptsd responsibility maybe you're a people pleaser or maybe too much responsibility was part of what hurt you when you were a kid and you ended up with a big wall around you that prevents you from saying yes to responsibility that can be a great coping strategy for a 12-year-old but it's not a good way to live for a
30y old or a 40y old or a 50-year-old it's time to say yes to your life with boundaries and to show up and start using your gifts that feeling that life is passing you by that feeling of emptiness that's what it feels like when there's been too much avoidance and self- protection and not enough standing up to bring it to bring your gifts into the world where they're desperately needed if you want to know what it's like when you reach that healed healing I say healed we're never done but when your healing is really in
progress it has telltale signs if you want to read my list of several signs of what it's like when your trauma healing is really starting to kick up and happen I have a free pdf that you can download right here and I will see you very [Music] soon [Music]
