when you're walking around with low self-esteem it can be hard to change that because when you're giving off that vibe and other people can sense it it can complicate your ability to bring into your life the good people who could support your happiness and your confidence and the development of good self-esteem so just feeling bad about yourself can have the effect of pushing those good people away from you and in turn that makes it harder to heal so this is why when your childhood ptsd symptoms flare it's as if you have this like dark cloud
around you and you're wondering where is everyone and i don't think we have to be perfect happy people to be loved and accepted there's room to have a bad day but abuse and neglect from your childhood can sometimes overtake the good parts of your personality the way you're smart and fun and easy going with your friends love about you and it can come and hang around like an internally generated kind of oppression and i call that the underdog effect now you may have heard me talk about that it's kind of like an identity it's an
energy that can block your ability to connect with people it can stop your healing just cold right when you need healing the most until you learn to release it so some people call this a dark cloud or it's a vibe or a feeling or bad energy but a simple way of describing the underdog effect is it's a set of non-verbal signals that we communicate to other people usually without any awareness that we're doing it whether we intend to or not we're telling people about our inner state and if you're feeling like you hate yourself or
that you don't belong or that people are against you other people are going to be able to sense that when they're around you and it's not through mind reading but because you know we're showing that with our words our facial expression our body language the way we dress our posture the way we respond to things or we don't respond and people pick it up in you you can sense it in other people too right most of us have done this we've given off a vibe or we felt it in another person and by the way
you can sense this in animals too have you ever met a dog who was abused in the past and you go hey doggie how's it going and even though your voice is kind and sweet your good dog the dog thinks they're in trouble and they go into that you know guilty dog pose and they start trembling so we do that sometimes the human equivalent is before we even know what's going on we think oh no i don't know what i must have done something i'm ashamed i messed up in our own way then it's like
we're trembling and when i used to do that myself i'd be ashamed just for being ashamed and i'd try to cover it by acting really tough or cocky or funny or just focusing on myself too much and so no matter how i reacted to it when i couldn't really accept myself i drove people away i was acting weird so childhood ptsd it's hard because when you're lonely it makes you lonelier and when you're having a hard time it makes everything harder it's like a downward spiral sometimes have you had that so what do you do
to stop playing the underdog i'm going to show you how to make it stop so that you can get back on your feet and connect with people again and start taking positive actions again toward your healing so first let's look at what's generating that dark cloud it begins with harsh events in your life that may be started in childhood things like neglect abuse that came from people who you trusted and most of us had some good experiences too but if the bad stuff is big enough it can get stuck in your idea of yourself your
self-concept and this can carry on for years or decades past the original hurt now i hear a lot from people who are bullied in school or they were you know treated badly because they were different maybe they were gay or maybe they were from another country and they had trouble speaking english or maybe they were poorer than other kids so we know what that's like as a kid and it goes on in adulthood and we experience it in workplaces you could end up in a relationship where you're mistreated and the longer you put up with
it the more you run the risk of internalizing it and you get so used to it that you don't even know you're doing it and it doesn't stop there the unhealed wounds of the past can propel you into more wounding trauma begets trauma and soon even though you're trying hard and you never want to make things worse for yourself you're bringing more problems into your life and the problems go from kind of being you know out here in your outer circumstances to getting internalized and becoming part of your personality or part of your experience so
for some people this is permanent and that is tragic but i'm here to tell you that the wounds of the past the trauma really can be healed and it might take a lot of focus and self mastery but you're up to that right now when you can face the part of the problem that you've internalized this is a great day because this is the part not your parents not their failure to ever recognize what they did or what they didn't do or their failure to apologize to you it's not anything in the past it's you
this you now that's who has power to change and if you think you can't change until someone else changes there are plenty of youtube channels out there that will nurture and validate that idea for you healing takes place through a change within it starts before you've begun to change sometimes when you make a decision that that's where you're aiming that's where you want to go is toward healing and sometimes it starts when you make a change so small that you're embarrassed to tell anybody it's such a small thing but this is how you lose the
underdog effect you take back your power from whatever happened to you and you start to change the things that are right in front of you and it's astonishing how much you can heal your self-esteem by changing the problems in your life right now this usually happens not in one big huge transformation but in a lot of little steps that you take over time so if you're with me so far let's talk more specifically about how to get free if you could look back in time and you could see perfectly clearly you'd see three things going
on with the underdog effect it's a combination of bad habits faulty decisions and distorted perceptions so habits decisions perceptions and how can you change these not by going back in time not by trying to get an apology from people who hurt you because even if that happened you'd still have your wounds and even if the world changed so that these hurts never happened to another kid that would be great but you would still have the habits and the faulty decisions and the difficulties with clear perception that you have right now and that's what i mean
when i say that this is an inside job now other people don't actually hold the key to healing your self-esteem they can influence you but you hold the key you hold the key now maybe you disagree with that and believe me there are hundreds of youtube channels for that too where you can get agreement but here and in my online courses and my coaching we take the focus inward we search out the things that we're doing to hold ourselves down because yes we can change those things there's other problems but these are the ones that
we can change and often changing these is enough to get over that mountain sometimes into where things start to get better and i know you may not have been taught how to change your habits and improve your decisions and your perceptions but i'm going to teach you right now so just keep things really simple let's take the example of being late for work all the time okay that's a bad habit if it's happening all the time it's not an accident now being late all the time is a decision that's causing problems so let's assume we
we want to have this job that we have and it's a faulty decision or a whole series of faulty decisions if we don't get up on time we don't leave for work we're getting ready at the last minute or we're letting ourselves get distracted so anything i do that predictably risks that i'm going to be late is a faulty decision now why would i do that why would i sabotage myself like that i want to be on time i want to keep my job but we know from recent research that people who had trauma in
childhood are often challenged to assess the risk involved in bad decisions so neurologically stress can bring on a temporary impairment of your ability to gauge the potential consequences of for example miscalculating the time it takes to get to work you can literally see this on an mri when a person with childhood trauma is stressed the left front cortex has less activities and that's where reasoning is supposed to happen the right front cortex which is where emotions happen gets more active so we wake up we feel hurried we get stressed and then our perception goes distorted
we make faulty decisions about when to leave the house then we're late which brings on more stress and you guessed it the negative cycle starts again so distorted perception faulty decision bad habit and our distorted perception can make it hard to tell the difference between something happening to us and a problem that we are generating what are we bringing on ourselves so instead of adjusting how we do things when we're dysregulated we rage traffic or we resent the bus or we feel judged by other people who give us a dirty look when we walk in
late it's however it plays out the end result is that we feel badly about ourselves we feel low self-esteem and maybe confused and distrustful all at the same time that is the underdog effect that's what makes all other dilemmas confusing that's how we generate the cloud around us that feels negative to other people so how do we change that it's easy to say you know society should change or there should be better treatments for trauma-related symptoms and that's all true that would be awesome but here in present time we have the immediate need to learn
to see more clearly which means keeping both sides of our brain up and running you know even and helping us perceive and respond to reality we need to make more rational decisions unlike everyone else we need to keep working on our habits a little bit better every day this may sound like a lot of work but you know it's happy work working on habits brings immediate payoffs and it's a heck of a lot easier than staying stuck in trauma symptoms or trying to change other people if you think you might have cptsd symptoms i've created
a quiz and you can take that it's on the free tools page of my website and that link is just below this video in the description section but just remember healing is possible you can do this it's okay that cptsd makes all of us a little sensitive a little quirky the goal here is not just to fit in or be perfect it's to be happy it's to be useful and connected to other people so that we can become our real selves and over time we can project less and less and less of that hurt self
that used to dominate our identity out onto other people you're in charge of your healing you get to ask for help but you get to decide what works for you and that's how you develop both strength and wisdom so this is your healing be brave keep moving forward today are you working on moving forward i've got a video i think you'll like it's all about accelerating your trauma healing so that you can get on with being happy and i've got that video right here and i will see you very soon [Music] you
