Goodness and Power - How to Rebuild a Lost Sense of Self

so when I got to therapy at the age of 20 I had no real sense of self and it was pretty underdeveloped due to Childhood trauma and at that time when I got to therapy I wouldn't have known to name my major problems that I had going on as not having a sense of self that knowledge definitely came later in the course of therapy and therapy was extremely helpful to me in getting my sense of self back and actually it was therapy with others in a in a group therapy that I was doing that I'll

talk more in depth about later at that time in my life to give you a picture of what not having a sense of self looks like um it looked for me it looked like things like this is I couldn't bring myself to disagree with people I was extremely flexible if not malleable with other people making decisions was excruciating and I would continuously put them off cuz I could not make a decision to save my life and I hid things that I liked or that I was passionate about for fear of how people would think about

that things like books ideas bands whatever and I would also put up with a lot of off behavior from friends and partners for fear of losing connection not having a sense of self is really a security issue related to that I didn't have the skills to bring something up or even know that bringing something up in in during conflict was an option without blowing up on somebody or having that come out of nowhere which is a trauma symptom being in a relationship for me made me feel okay and secure rather than having like an inner

sense of security and foundation and I was really lost without having a person in my life and being in a relationship to me felt like a life Fest and I also had no sense of having any personal power or choice I would only get out of situations due to last draws like I didn't know that I could leave a job when I wanted to or leave a relationship when I wanted to it always had to be in the worst circumstances that I could bring myself to leave something and my value was based upon performance my

worth was not internal rather it was dependent on how I did things like performances or what I provided I was also a chameleon in groups of people not really knowing where I landed socially I talk about that in a video called 11 oddly specific childhood trauma videos that I'll have in the description and lastly probably the most important part here is that I felt like I was a fraud as a person I saw others being able to assert themselves and their needs or Embrace their choices and live from a place of authenticity Without Really worry

about what others would think or say all of that really baffled me even though that I wanted to be like that it was really baffling for me this thing felt like impostor syndrome of pretending that I was a person not there was like impostor syndrome that I couldn't manage Excel or something like that but I felt like I was a fraud as a person and instead of having a strong inner healthy sense of self like most childhood trauma survivors I had to come up with something like a good enough substitute which is the false sense

of self we all need need something to kind of come up with when we don't grow up in healthy attachment and safety and related to that at age 11 I started playing drums and weirdly enough I chose them to make myself stand out from the other kids who were good at sports and stuff like that it's like a strategy but I didn't do it from having an inherent interest in actually playing the drums or a desire to play drums I just did it to kind of be somebody that was a strategy fortunately I fell in

love with playing drums and it really helped me through some terrible years it's it's still helps me and I still love them um in my late teens I played in drums and Indie bands and clubs and being pretty good at it I thought that that was my identity and and that I thought that that was my sense of self like hi I'm Patrick I play drums um playing drums for me and getting attention from it felt like having a life Fest in a sea of anxiety and doubt about feeling like a fraud at life otherwise

and it was the one thing that gave me value in my mind it made me okay only value an ability is kind of transactional as a human in the world and pretty egoic but I'm grateful for having that ability to play music because it kept me buoyant and not having any internal resources if I had a great night at a show then I had value if I made a mistake at a show then I would get super neurotic or needy about it and I lost any sense of goodness which is the theme to this video

many childhood trauma survivors find that same kind of life vest of value in things like say sex or appearance or work or being an artist or being a rebel uh or being super achieving we find something but it's not fully who we are it's just a part of who we are and valuing ourselves based on what we do solely always ends up empty and our worth is kind of conditional and fluid goodness doesn't really stick in those conditions only good performances and even those are fleeting again we don't really have a foundation of worth Beyond

of what we do and I think that that's a problem in society so just to be clear not having a strong sense of self doesn't mean you're totally vacant or empty there is enough really in there to build upon and it's important to not confuse symptoms of numbness with not having any sense of self at all and I'll get into that later let's define a sense of self many childhood trauma survivors struggle with things like identity personality and sense of self because there's a lot of overlap between those three things so to differentiate between those

three things let's start with identity identity are things that we identify with ranging from values to politics to music um one can view identity as things that we're aligned with on our insides and our interest and our values personality which we're born with is something a healthy family system and healthy attachment helps us develop our inner nature that we come out in the world with personality traits as infants and toddlers can range from things like spiritedness to being easygoing to being a rule follower to being shy to being cautious and we're born with a lot

that can either be nurtured or can be lost check out a video that I did on trauma personality versus our real personality I'll have that link in the description so the third thing sense of self which is our Focus here is what I would say is a foundational awareness of one's identity and personality and inherent goodness and also having some power which can come from the place of self-love and self-acceptance I know that that's a mouthful but and being raised to be allowed those two things goodness and power if we're loved as kids we can

love ourselves which becomes an inner reserve and some power can come from that goodness being things like worth Integrity dignity you can think of those things as the opposite of Shame with which will always be an elevated issue for those of us who grew up in childhood trauma and I also have a very detailed video about childhood trauma based shame lots of things going on in the description I'll put a video link there on shame to show you what I mean as a side note when say a three-year-old is told that they are bad or

that they're not lovable or an abusive parent is giving them horrific feedback a child's goodness is gone from them and that can feel like for them a life and death experience that's big it's telling them that they're unlovable when being lovable is their whole world of safety for their own development that concept being good and that idea about it being a life and death experience for a really small child is something that I feel like is missing from the DSM when they talk about PTSD in terms of life and death experiences they don't really talk

about that in terms of a child view in lack of goodness in our adulthood through our abuse conditioning is often what we feel when we assume we don't have the right to defend ourselves because we don't have that goodness or we overly defend like when we take things way to personally we're defending that lack of goodness or we tend to be in a fight response when triggered when we really defending we can also name that as shame and often a toxic family demands and meshman where we have some goodness kind of in such a family

only if we are selfless or if we only just go along or if we take what they say about us or say to us and not rock boats or be different or be an individual think about that if that resonates when you think about your family system in terms of goodness and enmeshment I look at a healthy sense of self as like a deep automatic assumption that not only do we exist but we have a right to the seat at the table at the human Collective because we automatically know that there is a good enough

and our goodness in place so shame tells us that we do not have a seat at the table and it tells us that we're bad for wanting a seat at the table having a strong sense of self is the opposite of when we automatically make ourselves small in various situations because there is an internal valuing of ourselves in our security my definition of self is rooted in personal power and goodness and goodness and power is I think are the missing ingredients that we want kids to have when they're going through development it sure makes life

a hell of a lot easier if we feel like we're a good person doing good things and we have some some agency in life so what does a healthy sense of self look like here is what I mean a big thing I think is the ability to include oneself socially in the form of belonging that can also kind of involve self- advocacy we can include ourselves in conversation and also take some risk without the intense fear of being ostracized or self-sabotaging or something like that sense of self is actually a pretty action-oriented thing another thing

is the ability to disagree with somebody without messy internal complications this is again we're talking about a healthy sense of self another is knowing who we are in a good enough way not too big not too small another when we have a good solid sense of self is we have the ability to not absorb feedback from other people or get super defensive or confused by other people's feedback another is the ability to stick to one's choices and convictions not easily being vulnerable to somebody else's suggestions or conflicting ideas or even manipulation like people can't easily

change your mind and I I'm not talking about you being stubborn another is the ability to be comfortable being alone as kind of a recharge without feeling abandoned left out fomo or existentially off if we're alone or if we're single another is the ability to make good decisive choices in a good enough way without intense discomfort or self-doubt the same coin is the ability to change our mind without shame even if changing our mind impacts others another is having a sense of one's personhood and kind of sovereignty in the world where one doesn't need to

assimilate in somebody else's life or a group and not really be a chameleon depending on social situations another is the ability to give voice and Advocate and push back for oneself even prior to say puberty and during development choices ideas preferences healthy kids can do that and helping parents discern how much pushing back is okay and how much is not it's the idea of like shared power with children not power all on the kids not power all on the adults so as a side note the term in all that list the term ability doesn't mean

that it's going to be super easy breezy a lot of those things are still going to be uncomfortable but the person has the ability to do that those things because they have a healthy sense of self so how might we have an undeveloped sense of self from Child the trauma so I'm going to give you another list here of contrasting scenarios and ideas between healthy parenting and unhealthy parenting healthy parents allow for differences among children and siblings and having those differences even be celebrated unhealthy parents assign abusive roles to their children such as the smart

one or the scapegoat or the adult provider that's like parentification and also conflating individual needs and interest as selfish to be someone needs to burden others healthy parents support their children in their choices and feelings such as not wanting to play with another kid anymore due to things being one-sided or that they just a friendship is dwindling in that scenario unhealthy parents are overly concerned about how the other kid would feel which takes away our sense of self as a side note this is an example of the parents codependency and encouraging of having no self

going on a children's person would here is diminished and buried and kind of shamed um in this case it's like other people always come first you come last another example is healthy parents behave in authentic ways and they model being true to oneself they display good boundaries they display good choices and they display healthy self-care and self-investment unhealthy parents can be shut down and overly selfless like from a codependent place or parents can have a very inflated grandiose sense of self where self- advocacy is always aggressive and kind of icky to have a self here

means to manipulate another example is healthy parents make it okay for their children to push back on the parental power Dynamic allowing for expression but the parents are still parenting like a child can express that they don't like something and there's still good enough parental discretion unhealthy parents overpower they use authoritarianism or Terror or they create unspoken Dynamics and rules that push back from a child having really horrific consequences on the child or cause the parent to maybe fall apart if a child does push back in this case voice and personhood are not options and

are lost another example is healthy parents allow for emotional struggles and developmental challenges without shame or judgment there's an understanding of a child's goals and their humanity and most importantly allowing a child to have a process unhealthy parents are often not child Centric and demand suppression of self and do not allow space or Milestones so kids kind of have to perform above their developmental stage or become little adults for the adults which isn't really real the process of becoming a self is skipped and lost here lastly is unhealthy parents provide unconditional love and children still

feel safe in the inconvenient kind of messiness that is parenting even when the child is going through a messy emotions or issues it's some something that will pass instead of it being named as who they are I hope that that makes sense unhealthy parents will flip the script of basic parenting into their children being problems which sticks to our insides and becomes our false sense of self and are self-rooted in shame you know like the idea here it's it's not that you're a child it's that you're the problem so let's recap on those fundamental messages

in the unhealthy parenting examples so the unhealthy parenting messages about remember one was to have a self means to manipulate another is to be someone means to burden others another is voice and personhood are not options and are lost another is the process of building a self is skipped and lost and lastly it's not that you're a child it's that you're a problem and we can gather from that list that neglect and shame are major factors of not being able to develop a sense of self and safety and as a side note healthy parents because

they're healthy they're not projecting their own trauma in a good enough way or putting their child into roles healthy parents are simply not insane and apathetic all of these things are going to also affect our sense of self if we really have a parent who's like high intensity High abuse I'd also like to take a second here to talk a little bit about the channel and I greatly appreciate your viewership and I have a hard ask which is at about 69% of my viewers who watch and comment and and taken the videos are not subscribed

yet subscribing to the channel greatly supports me in being able to get this content out to you so if you just take a second hit the Subscribe button it really helps so given all that how does one rebuild jumpstart Embrace a healthy sense of self that's again rooted in power and goodness I'm going to discuss three ways in order of what you can do here the first one is what specifically has been missing for you when it comes to sense of self like qualities of self thinking over the course of your life and even even

if some of these things have changed what sense of self qualities have been missing for you let's start here and get a sense of what needs to be jump started so we have to kind of figure out what's missing so these things can look like not being able to say no not being able to take some risk not being able to disagree with others again struggling with things like decisions struggling with being single another is embracing your own likes and another is pushing back on other things either at work or in Partnership or even with

our own kids asking for clarification it sounds goofy but it's a John Bradshaw idea where those who go through childhood trauma often have a thing where they will not ask questions and clarification for fear of the person's response or what they think of them for asking the question um in other is not really knowing your wor to the course of your life another is not considering yourself those of us who struggle with having a sense of self we tend to consider others way more than we consider ourselves um we don't really have an awareness that

we have some personal power another is um we don't really enjoy alone time that can often be pretty triggering not really enjoying being social for the chameleon thing or not wanting to uh put our foot in our mouths or not trying to like make mistakes all of that are examples of sense of self isues so take some time here and write out some concrete examples where not having a sense of self had unwanted consequences on you in big and small ways like not saying no to something that was really damaging to you such as when

you were trying to maybe break up with someone and they talked you into staying and that made things worse to much smaller ideas to smaller examples where you walk away from a conversation kind of going like oh why did I say I like that book when I hated that book why did I do that to myself I hate it when I do that that kind of stuff and a good place to take it from here is to start doing inner child work where you have active conversations with our undeveloped sense of self our undeveloped inner

child and gradually giving that child what's been missing the whole time which is some mirroring and some love and I have a playlist that I'll again I'll put in the description of the video is a playlist on inner child work that you can start there inner child work is really having safe conversations from our loving inner adult um it's really the main ingredient to having a sense of self I think and uh we do a lot of that work in my membership where I teach those skills or we're having to work with our inner child

who is still operating from the childhood trauma place the second way you can start to build up having a sense of self is really looking at the concepts of feelings and relationship to self in many ways our feelings equal self if you don't know where to start in terms of rebuilding a sense of self start to focus on your feelings feelings are really the fuel to self and self is like the action or the engine let's walk through this idea through a diagram so we have the two basic ideas of feelings and self on the

feeling side feelings such as being inspired by something boundaries are not really feelings but we definitely feel things when people cross our boundaries or we don't State them feelings such as sad mad Joy feelings such as attraction feelings on the left side we have self which is kind of concrete things like decisions assertion choices aspirations and I put inevitability there as I'm not trying to make a spoof on a Marvel movie because I think stos said that in an Avengers movie inevitability is really understanding our beautiful uniqueness in the universe there's only one of us

and that's kind of an inevitable kind of a thing that's like a sense of self kind of concept that's kind of interesting to me and another power is a huge ingredient to sort of self and notice how one is about action and the feeling side is is fuel where they overlap is it's like where the kind of magic comes in here is being authentic when someone can be authentic it tells us that they have a sense of self when they can be real you know same kind of a thing when they can be empowered to

themselves and push back on things when they can be spontaneous not impulsive but spontaneous in a healthy way I really think that that's a really kind of showing us that we've done a lot of childhood trauma work uh we can set limits we can know our own limits we can kind of come back to our intuition and what I like about this idea sense of self is coming back to Carl Yung and individuation is we are separate we are we are separate from our partner in a healthy way we're separate from family in a healthy

way we have our own uniqueness we're not part of something for safety I mean we all need to be part of things but I think as childhood trauma survivors again coming back to that concept of having a life Fest is what I mean moving on to another variation of this just to show how it works is that feelings being the fuel Drive the sense of self more and the action that comes from sense of self when we make decisions when we assert ourselves we're doing limits when we make decisions we're being more authentic we're being

more real when we work on and kind of work on our aspirations we might be spontaneously going out to take a painting class our in inevitability is also applicable to our separateness in our power is about setting limits or knowing our limits so they really kind of affect each other in interesting ways so what you can do with that those ideas from the diagram is to do some Journal writing on your feelings specifically what did you feel as a kid when you were going through your trauma be as specific as you can hear about the

feelings and situations those feelings were the fuel of your sense of self that actually kind of got lost you know some examples here's what I mean I'm trying to say that the sense of self was always there and is there we just have to do some work around it some examples of its Journal writing is did you really dislike or feel uncomfortable around the stepparent those were your feelings did you feel aware that parents invested more in say one of your siblings because of their gender or personality or something those were your feelings did you

feel bad for a parent and wanted them to be happier and more present for you those were your feelings did you hate the way that you were treated or how things were dealt with by the adults again those were your feelings did you feel intense Shame about your family or your situation or all of it feelings now once you've kind of got that in place some additional writing and this is kind of tricky because you have to use your imagination here what would it have felt like if you had a healthy adult in your life

that said yes to those things that you were having some big feelings about and it actually had an impact meaning what would have happened if another parent validated your feelings about the stepparent and took action to make things better what would have happened if the parent got honest with you and started to balance the attention between you and say something like The Golden Child what would have happened if the parent got their life together and focused on you instead of you being so aware of them and you being focused on them and this is not

really like a would have should have could have kind of exercised it's playing around with what would have happened to your sense of self had you mattered to the adults in your life who could validate what you were feeling and those are some Basics around parenting and Basics around how we develop a sense of self the opposite again is say with the golden child scenario we just feel invisible not worthy and we don't have a sense of ourselves after we kind of leave home into adulthood and in all of those examples and those situations maybe

think of the children's Bill of Rights which is in my membership course these are 10 basic rights of children during healthy development and my favorite one is the right to affect somebody all of these examples that I just listed in this exercise meant that we didn't affect our parents we didn't have an impact on them because whatever reason wasn't our fault and having an impact on parents is crucial to developing a sense of self it's sort of like if you're in pain they take action that means we affect them and coming back to those diagrams

and this idea is that sense of self comes from feelings a potential barrier in a little bit of this work is when we're disconnected from our feelings for various different childhood trauma symptoms such as numbness dissociation lack of memory self-doubt and Trauma responses those symptoms do not mean that you don't have those feelings underneath they just kind of eclipse them due to the intensity of the survival mechanisms that you might have done with going on so what to do with all that this is where therapy inner child work or some kind of help really comes

in to help with those trauma responses I believe in therapy I know that therapy is loaded for many people or that it's not accessible as it should be it's really where we can gradually get help in processing and uncovering therapy is a really good place to start and I really Advocate that people try to find a trauma therapist who gets this stuff as best as you can and I totally get it if that's really not available everyone has to have their own starting point and you might be more in tune with those feelings that F

your sense of self and maybe you just need to kind of need a little bit of help connecting the dots you can get that kind of help in with the membership that I offer on childhood trauma which is really right up here but again I really Advocate that you try to do your best and find a therapist lastly on this and this is super important I buy product of good therapy or good work and grieving with getting some help around what happened to us is to come back back more so into our body that we're

home again in our body if we're numb or if we live in our trauma responses or we're really dissociative or super anxious from a place of self-doubt that means we're really kind of in our heads and not grounded in the emotional body the third and the last part that you can kind of work to develop and restart a sense of self is what I'm just simply calling social practice receiving connection and feedback to develop self the last and most important tool to rebuild a sense of self after childhood trauma is something that many people aren't

really that into which I get but having some kind of community and getting feedback from healthy people are just really crucial to our recovery I was able to get that in a group therapy model that I did when I started therapy and if we're supposed to develop a sense of self as infants and Todds from San healthy caregivers who can help and see us we still need that kind of Community Connection in some good enough way many of us might get that from a safe partnership but we shouldn't so rely on our partners for missing

parental pieces that's like a common trap that happens in couples so how to do that so I would start by looking into joining interpersonal therapy groups or find a community of fellow childhood trauma survivors and start to engage as best as you can considering maybe looking into some 12-step program options these are free options such as adult children of Alcoholics uh which does a lot of family- based inner child stuff there's also codependence Anonymous um and you really have to find meetings that work for you and yes 12-step programs have problems that I'm not going

to sugarcoat or anything like that but there really are good meetings out there with good people who are working on different issues you just really have to take it slow and kind of be careful and find the safe meetings with good people so for many of us the worst thing that we struggle with is being around other people but it's also the thing that's the most healing I think and why I'm suggesting this for a sense of self problems is groups are really the place where we can learn to be more comfortable in our own

skin and be among people while continuously separating ourselves from our family stuff and separating the people in our lives from our family stuff it's best I think if you can join a therapy group that isn't just learning something like DBT but where there's really kind of an in-depth back and forth among group members I think that that's ideal I don't recommend just going for like a teex space online community something like you know Reddit or something like that Reddit is awesome to get a sense of things but it's not real intimacy I think the social

piece is probably the most important piece of building a rebuilding a sense of self um because being part of something being accepted where you can take risk to be more authentic really builds up our inner goodness and our sense of power and fights the shame and cuts down on the distrust that really gets in the way of having a solid sense of self so some final thoughts building a sense of self is a process much like when we develop through childhood that leads to this psych concept called individuation which means to fully become distinct from

other things while being able to be part of the world you are your own person it doesn't mean you can't do intimacy or your loner you're able to maintain your sense of self while you're in relationships you don't Lose Yourself around others like we see when we were going through childhood trauma so the important part of being part of a community is that so we can actually practice intimacy and being part of my big healing moment in my life really was in a long-term childhood trauma group that I often reference when I was about 20

and a fellow member who I triggered um and we actually because of that trigger we did some conflict work together with the help of a therapist and the end result of that was the person I triggered simply said to me you're a good person and that conflict was about me showing up in my trauma self or my inauthentic self and I would unintentionally minimize people's feelings uh because when people were upset I feel like I was responsible for the upset and also responsible for fixing it I really didn't have the ability to just sit with

someone's pain I would try to immediately get you out of that pain which really invalidates your pain to begin with so conflict can be terrifying but in safe places with a skilled group therapists like I mentioned can really lead to some powerful changes in authenticity so hearing you're a good person really changed my life because I had this really unconscious assumption that I was not a good person unnamed never really thought about it but because of my childhood trauma that's really the way that I operated the world and being a good person stuck with me

and I had it's like I had new info that changed everything in my life and it says a lot about what happens to someone who grows up in childhood trauma that's incredibly shame-based having no concept of goodness or power you know power is the by product of our goodness and that's often the problem where we're missing huge chunks of foundation inside that will get us through life in a good way of being a good person having value being worthy and that interaction with that group member it lifted me out of a nearly like 15-year depression

um and I was only 20 at the time that moment is when I started to really build up a sense of self for the first time and yes as simple and as cliched and as steart SMY as it sounds that's actually a sad Night Live character from In the way back you can just Google steuart SMY and you'll see what I mean I'm good enough I'm smart enough uh the difference is that that statement came from somebody else that was a group member to me so if you've lived your life in black and white coming

into color is really a new experience with having a knowledge that you're a good person I'll say it sort of for you all you're a good person and I really hope that that can have an impact on you lastly part of not having a healthy sense of self means means that feeling okay is dependent on things like I said like performance or how we look or if people seem to value US in the moment but it's dependent on outside figal kind of changes such as a date not liking us like we can really it's like

we're too much flapping around in the wind not having a sense of self that's also why being in an abusive or narcissistic relationship is a vicious cycle where the abuser's approval of us gives us a sense of self and safety but it's so fleeting and inconsistent one hour you're on one hour you're off so changing approval is also a sign of having a poor sense of self raise your hand out there if you've ever been caught up in that and to close I want you to know that your sense of self is already there and

it's there in what you feel what you felt like was right and wrong when you were a teenager about your family and what you want to become in the world we just need some help from others to give us kind of a green light to be more of ourselves while helping us get some ideas about who that self is so many of us are surprised when we hear good intention people say that we're creative funny deep thinking Carefree if you're surprised it means you're not really yet in tune with yourself which is very possible to

become in tune with yourself that's been a lot for me I hope that this was helpful to you I would love to hear your thoughts I hope that this is productive for you and as always may you be filled with loving kindness May may you be well may you be peaceful and at ease and may you be joyous and I will see you next time [Music]