living with trauma driven struggles goes on so long sometimes that you might find that even the thought of Breaking Free of old behaviors and problems sound scary like if you had the love and peace in your life that you you know you want what would you actually do all day it's normal and okay that we float for a while avoiding reality and seeking Comfort just to get by until we feel ready to get moving in Earnest on our healing but soon your future starts to pull on you drawing you forward showing you the things that
have been hard to face and then everything depends on Rising to face it my letter today is from a woman I'll call matri and she writes dear fairy I'm struggling with several issues I'd like your advice on my first concern involves self-doubt and trusting my own experiences and decisions during healing I've got my fairy pencil I'm going to go through and circle things I want to come back to on a second reading but let's see what's going on in matri's life right now she says since distancing myself from unhealthy ties with family members and previous
friends that I trauma bonded with in order to Foster healthier relationships I feel very vulnerable uncertain and alone totally out of my element I once watched an interesting video about how lobsters grow a soft-bodied creature a lobster lster will begin to outgrow its hard outer shell as it matures causing it pressure and discomfort for growth to occur however the lobster must shed its Old Shell completely and hide under rocks for some time during which it is vulnerable and extra vigilant while rejuvenating a new more befitting shell for its stage of growth it's lovely I feel
like a lobster who's trying to grow in my new shell I feel unprotected without my famili circle of complaining trauma bonded friendships and breadcrumb relationships because at least it was some type of connection and perceived protection from the dooming abandonment malan dooming yep I seem to make friends so easily in my 20s and early 30s but I'm Rocky at making new healthy friendships and feel like I always say something weird or off-putting to the other person I get you my past in sites and intuitions have been the unhealthy result of cptsd driven beliefs and behaviors
I feel embarrassed and foolish and retrospect because I felt so confident that I was right at the time if my red flag detector was damaged I've lacked experiencing healthy relationships how do I know I'm doing the right thing how can I trust myself if I rely on new healthy friends and support networks for clarity and awareness of my role in situations and appropriate next steps then how do do I know when to trust my own gut feeling what if their advice is just the way they would do things and not right for me my childhood
experiences have left me with a lot of anger resentment confusion and a longing to be accepted particularly by men I have an underlying fear of abandonment issues with being assertive and setting boundaries I'm doing my best to maintain humility as I'm growing though feelings of embarrassment have surfaced while reflecting on both my arrogance and naivity over the years I have a few Family Ties and have made efforts to distance myself because I don't feel they've been very kind to me I'm just realizing I've been the family scapegoat I feel like I'm drifting alone in the
world I become frustrated and full of Rage when the smallest things go wrong and I feel the strong impulse to hit and punch things several times a week I take it out on poor cardboard shipping boxes I use medical marijuana daily oh okay and it's been my crutch since I was 14 years old I know all this at this point I need to deal with my anger and shame but what does that look like are there other practical Tools in addition to the Daily practice that I can use also does every feeling have to be
sourced back to resentment and fear I sometimes have trouble placing all my disregulated thoughts and feelings into just these two buckets I really want to find a partner and desire marriage I want someone who can travel with me and will be my family at my age it feels like most of my friends are married and or have children already I feel like I'm being left behind The Unwanted one I look in the mirror and see the start of gray hair eye wrinkles small age spots and I feel like I'm running out of time it seems
like all the good men are taken or I'm not attracted to the ones who are I know this isn't true but where are they I've been making healthier more outgoing choices since listening to your videos I read the books took your dating course and I'm attending your retreat this month I've been doing Pilates every weekday morning for the past two years which has really helped my confidence mood and body pain I recently graduated with a master's degree in business bought a home and manag a successful Airbnb I have a secure remote job in hospital Administration
though I don't care about it and I don't feel it uses my talents and I'm about to get a big promotion I've joined my Works chapter of Toast Masters began piano lesson and began ballroom dancing on Friday nights I feel like I'm in a good place to start dating again I don't have any social media and I feel foreign to online dating so I'm not certain how to meet healthy available people I'm a 35-year-old woman never married and don't desire children I grew up in a home full of abuse with a domineering ex-military mother who
was controlling and emotionally and physically abusive she would say things to me like I'm your God your judge I own you what you you are the most selfish I ever met the dad I grew up with was extremely abusive and used religion to control and abuse my mother I watched him Crush her collarbone with his bare hands and break her ribs by kicking her repeatedly we were trained to lie about it to teachers and police our house had an anxious heavy feel to it filled with the helpless confusion of tiny children living in the shadow
of a monster I spent most of my time reading books watching Animal Planet and writing short stories after my mother was Baker acted that means involuntarily locked up she divorced my dad when I was and she puts quotes around Dad I'm not sure why um when I was seven and revealed to me that he wasn't my real father I see my biological father was the same as my older sister's a dangerous and abusive man she said he didn't want me either and it was his loss I felt very unwanted for a long time and I'm
still riddled with an internalized sense of rejection and shame my great uncle became the only Father Figure in my life a temperamental older man that constantly criticized me and expressed his disappointment that I wasn't a boy as I worked on his farm I thought I had dealt with my childhood trauma long ago because I strive to make so much more of my life distant from the trailer park I came from I've overcome so much and have done things that others only dream of such as serving in the Peace Corps in Africa and traveling to 36
countries but now I think I've been mistaking achievement and staying busy for healing I tend to only feel good enough when I'm accomplishing something or feel something is perfect I tend to rush through everything especially aspects of self-care I often feel the people don't really like me once they get to know me or as I've done something wrong or inappropriate I Fawn and freeze during moments when I want to remain strong and poised I admire when others assert themselves yet when I have the opportunity I feel a lump in my throat I sweat and my
body prickles all over I really want to stop and to find a good man to spend my life with any tough love you can offer would be appreciated thank you matri okay matri what a beautiful letter what a great writer you are um you very vividly portray what it's like to be you in a way there's so many points in here where I can understand completely what you're saying and and then a couple places where I'm like huh I don't get it but uh it's it's really an usually well-written letter and thank you for that
it's uh you describe a beautiful sense of disconnection clearly you are a writer I don't know you know so by now that I'm reading this letter after the retreat so I guess you and I have met but I don't know who you are and um which is probably good you know because then I'm very objective about this so all right let me tell you about what I what I heard you say here you distanced yourself from your family and previous friends that you had trauma bonded with in order to Foster healthier relationships now I think
when you say trauma bonded with you mean that you guys both had trauma and you related on that and so that was a big basis of your relationship so I just want to point out that trauma bonding actually means something different I'm not I think that I think well if I'm wrong and you did mean what it really means I stand corrected but I just want to say trauma bonding is intermittent reinforcement it's when somebody loves you takes it away loves you takes it away and it it like causes your brain to like hook on
addictively to them and you'll do anything to stay with them and it can work not just on people or children you know but on rats it's a psychological torture technique and I don't think that's what you meant um but a lot of people common usage they say trauma bonded um when they mean we're just a bunch of effed up people hanging out and I know what you mean on that front I love your Lobster analogy yes changing is like that sometimes we have this vulnerable period where we don't have a shell and it takes a
while to grow a new one and so we have to kind of hide out for a while you got to watch out because it's also like the favorite excuse of people of avoidance of people who just want to go isolate for a long time and they go look I'm healing I'm healing for 25 years you know and um sometimes it goes long past its usefulness as a healing technique and it's just avoidance and too much avoidance and you can't heal so um I throw that in there but I think your Lobster analogy is just beautiful
and perfect so it's hard to make friends you feel unprotected without your familiar circle of complaining trauma bonded friendships and breadcrumb relationships cuz at least it was some type of connection yes I totally relate and you know what I've been through like three cycles of this like CH change of the cast of characters because that's how many times I've had to make radical changes forward in my life I had a long way to go and then I also understand what you're saying here your past quote insights and intuitions were messed up they they they they
turned out not to be reliable you were certain about what you were feeling and then in time it turned out they were trauma driven beliefs your red flag detector was operating and that is so normal and I just love that you actually you are insightful enough to just say oh yeah I thought it was my intuition but it was my trauma talking we all do that it drives people crazy I have a video out there that says don't trust these gut instincts and what I'm talking talking about is when the trauma is talking and like
oh yeah you got to do this self-destructive thing and people often comment it on it without watching the video going you should always trust your instincts and I'm like not if you have what I have it takes us time to heal enough to know what the difference is between gut instincts and the trauma talking which which is you know sometimes all we know at first so good for you for being careful on the distinction there so you're asking so much the right questions how do I know I'm doing the right thing how can I trust
myself those are the right questions you know when you're fully healing when you're fully engaged in your healing you will learn to do that through trial and error the way everybody else did but at a somewhat younger age than we did right we have a we have a delay in our development and so we end up with a lack of clarity around aspects of ourselves that our peers our age peers already have and we think oh I'm terrible but it's really normal for people who were severely neglected and abused as you were to have a
delay there and it's kind of beautifully designed like that somehow the child versions of ourselves know how to sort of pack it away you know keep it safe from everything just close it down and then bring it out later but it's just that when it's coming out later in adulthood it's a little messy and it's a little bit confusing and and it's um causes us to be alone for long periods of time which is hard but part of it it's part of it you've got such a good um ability to describe what you're going through
how yeah should you listen to other people's advice or is it just yeah other people's advice is always their advice and what they would do so we take it under advisement we take it with a grain of salt sometimes hearing other people's experience can help us get in touch with our own best wisdom so it's okay to ask for advice I just wouldn't recommend completely surrendering your decisions to somebody else's advice unless you're incapacitated in some way or unless you have reasons that you really trust their judgment and you think that what they're suggesting is
the best thing for you in which case it's your wisdom right it's your decision so you got left with a lot of anger resentment confusion and longing to be accepted uhhuh what I think is clearly very Advanced about your healing is that you do your you say I'm doing my best to maintain humility as I'm growing through feelings of embarrassment reflecting on my arrogance and naivity over the years if you're aware that you have arrogance and naivity you are well on your way to Healing I mean really like so many people don't get that far
and it's hard you know for those of us who realize we have faults to interact with people who absolutely believe they have no Faults who believe that they actually are better and Superior in judgment you know it's hard it's hard to do that it can make it painful to apologize sometimes when we've been arrogant to somebody who doesn't realize that their arrogance is arrogance but you know what we get better anyway it doesn't matter how far along they are I love that you are in touch with that about yourself that is that's a really good
sign that you're you're making good progress so you have few Family Ties they haven't been kind you've been the scapegoat yeah that's a whole thing isn't it and a lot of what you're describing as kind of scapegoat wounds I feel like I'm drifting alone in the world yes I I know that feeling so well but you found us now you you know hopefully the crappy childhood fairy Community feels like a tribe and if you came to that Retreat hopefully you became a member and you've made friends here the people here are like more than anybody
in the world who I feel at home with who I feel understood by and I never felt understood until I started putting my experience on YouTube and got some comments back I was just like they you know people would comment back like I can't believe you're describing what it's like to me be me and I reply back to them I can't believe you have had this experience too I literally thought I was the only one so it turns out we have a lot of normal symptoms of growing up with something abnormal going on and when
we find each other it really helps to take the shame off and help make it understandable that we got like this like it's not our fault that we develop this this manner this mode and now we're the ones who are charged with finding a way to undo it to to um relax the grip of these trauma driven adaptations so that we can start to have some of the Finer Things in life some of the more subtle things like like love and connection and those are often lost to us when we're in survival mode when we're
just being tough and strong and you know we get very like you know black and white thinking about things CU we had to in order to survive but then we start opening our minds and it's messy just like you describe so you said you feel frustrated and full of Rage when the smallest things go wrong and you get a strong impulse to hit and punch things and you take it out on a cardboard shipping box all right I'm just going to get in here with some advice cuz you asked I don't think that's a good
idea I think it's normal that you're having emotional disregulation and intense rage and you may have been told that it's all very meaningful and you need to feel it and explore it but I question that I don't think that's always true I think if you have um if you had a lot of childhood trauma and you tend to get emotionally disregulated there's actually no bottom to that anger so whereas another person who didn't have trauma they're like yeah I punched a cardboard box and then I had cathar and I was fine did that happen to
you it doesn't sound like it so you know venting rage has never worked for me and there it's got people have looked at it like punching pillows screaming that sort of thing there's no evidence that it helps really of anger actually I'll tell you what does um keep people trapped in Anger weed daily weed use you can call it medical marijuana if you want because of course it can be used in a in a medicinal way um but when it's used daily and I understand for some people like that's how they roll and that's fine
but if you're asking me yeah that's um keeping you from being able to process anger and I don't just mean psychologically I just mean like neurologically I noticed this a long time ago uh in my life you know I've I've known lots and lots of people who were daily marijuana users I've also I made the correlation like in my 20s like gosh they're all so dang angry after a while that's where it goes and I'm sure there are exceptions but that's my observation is people who use weed every every day no matter how much they
claim it's medicinal for them it turns them angry and stuck that's that's my observation for whatever it's doing for you is it worth it cuz I don't think having rage and having to like scream and punch boxes is is good for marriage I don't think so and this is you know you're asking like what's going on here you even said it's been my crutch since I was 14 so there's probably a lot of stuff that 14-year-old you just never got to really move through and figure out how to process because you've had a mind-altering thing
going on and I'm really not anti- mind altering things I'm just trying to be real about mind-altering things will keep you from processing thoughts and feelings and if you have complex PTSD and I could see why you might because of your childhood and what you live through the complex PTSD can make it very difficult to process thoughts and feelings to move them from this active charge state where all your all your adrenaline and cortisol comes up for small things and processing it into a memory and so when you have a lot of that kind of
stuck in your Consciousness or body or you know it's hard to really Envision like how is that exactly stored in us it's just there it's just like reactive it's ready to go well if you want to process that I would just really consider getting off mind altering substances and maybe maybe you don't do it forever maybe you do it for a period of time while you're healing so that you can feel the feelings that are there with the daily practice and I can tell from what you're saying you've maybe dipped your toe in it when
you wrote this letter now that you did a 4day retreat with me I bet you've done it a lot more and you understand more and hopefully you were able to ask me questions there and I'll I'll talk about that in a minute but the daily practice can't work when you're on mind altering substances so there you go it can't do its thing um what I would describe as the benefit of the daily practice based on my experience is you know in the daily practice for anybody who doesn't know it's a technique it's a very spec
specific technique for writing to release um resentful and fearful thoughts very specific technique and it's free I'll teach it to you if you just try this at home you risk doing something that would just make you more upset so that's why I'm very insistent take the free course um or or you can read my book re-regulated to learn how to do it and you can always get the links to the course and the book down in the description section below and remember there's a little like more button more link that you have to click you
you you'll see like the top few lines of the description section under every video you have to open it by clicking that little link that says more and then you'll see lots and lots of links and information about how to access my stuff and things that you might find helpful many of them free so with the daily practice what the basic idea is is you're naming you're not you're not sourcing you're not you're I what you're describing is something much too active in anal analytical and trying to make things go a certain way you're just
naming what's bothering you and lumping it into two rough buckets and we're talking about things that bother you so there's either anxious category which is fear or angry category which is resentment and you you name them you ask for them to be removed and then you rest your mind for 20 minutes we call that meditation just rest your mind let your mind recompose itself and then see what happens now the thing is if you're high everybody gets disregulated sometimes even non-traumatized people and everybody eventually re-regulated when you're high you can't and you can't recognize signs
of disregulation when they show up it's it's indistinguishable maybe if it were severe you could detect it or you detect it but really what we're doing when we're healing is we're teaching ourselves to be aware when we've sort of fallen into disregulation and I would liken that process I don't know if you get migraines I used to get them a lot I rarely get them anymore but it's like you can feel them coming all of a sudden you're like oh no oh no there's almost nothing you can do to turn it around and then it
comes and then you're like launched into this this neurological State and you are stuck there for a while and it takes a while to come back out and it's very much the same with disregulation you don't want to get disregulated all the time but traumatize people we do we we lapse easily into disregulation we have a harder time coming out of it so what we do in my healing method is we learn to notice the signs of disregulation and turn it around very quickly learn to reregulate and stay regulated more of the time because my
darling when you are regulated you the world is your oyster you have choices you have pauses between things you don't like and how you want to respond to it you have access to your intelligence to your wisdom to your intuition like things are starting to really come online for you when you're regulated the minute doing mind altering things and including prescribed medicine you you're you're going to break that easy access for you to learn and follow the impulses that you're getting that are telling you now I'm disregulated okay here I go I'm getting back re-regulated
so like in my courses we do we do re-regulation journals it's it's all documented in the book how you do this but it's all about like tuning in and tuning in takes all the awareness you've got now the thing about the daily practice is it provides emotional relief I wouldn't expect anybody to give up you know whether it was weed or cigarettes like it was for me or booze as it was for some people or you know other drugs or raging or whatever you know that people are using to get out of the sadness and
out of the disregulation but there is a better way you need a way to comfort yourself there's a way you can get comforted that's more stable less consequential like when I was using cigarettes to reregulate I didn't know that's what I was doing but looking back I'm like oh yeah that's what I was doing you know I could smoke a cigarette and it would kind of help me hold it together when I was falling apart neurologically you know you kind of okay and it's something about the drug and the pause that you take to smoke
but every time I'd quit I I basically would get depressed and disorganized mentally to the point that it didn't even seem worth it to quit it would be it would be better in my mind back then to just go ahead and get cancer compared to what I was feeling and I'm so glad I found a better way to feel better that's not cigarettes that's sustainable I've done it for 30 years now I do it twice a day and it does help it helps me feel smoothed out calm alert aware of myself it's made such a
difference in my life from doing that twice a day so that's the idea so you can dip in and out a lot of people do they learn the daily practice and they're you know they do it once here once there and they're like yeah that's nice I don't know and then they're doing all this other stuff but that's I just want to be honest with you yeah the you know using weed every day is is just going to make it really hard for the daily practice to do its thing for you and if you if
you dare you know you could take a day off of the weed see how it goes write and meditate a lot to deal with the feelings that come up that's what's going to come up right feelings maybe some physical symptoms there's some withdrawal with weed it's not considered the hardest drug in the world but the people I know who have given up it's it's hard you know it's a it's a it's a major thing but you could take it one day at a time I would not expect your anger to resolve really well if you're
treating it with with weed so in the daily practice we do we do have a place to take our anger now you sound like you've done therapy before and perhaps you still do and maybe that was helpful to you for me I would get angrier and angrier in therapy because for me talking about my trauma which was how it was always done when I did therapy at the 11 therapist I used to see over time you know it just would trigger more anger and more disregulation I wasn't able to process my thoughts whatever they were
saying that was helpful and good advice I couldn't really take it in or act on it or remember it even and so so there was this mismatch between the method and my my symptoms because in those days they didn't know they didn't know what was cptsd and they didn't know about disregulation but now we know so when you say are there other practical Tools in addition to the Daily practice that I can use I would say sure there's tons of things out there that people use and you can try them but H doing a dozen
things is not the thing that's missing here it's doing one thing fully and if you like the daily practice why don't you go ahead and give it your all and do it as taught and that means either get my book re-regulated and read all of chapter 3 and the appendix so that you understand how this works because these questions where you're like why do why do we have to put it all in fear and resentment that's like right there in the FAQs it's there for you it's because we're keeping it simple we're not we're keeping
it simple and we're not naming all the feelings we're just naming the distress feelings and we're putting them in two buckets and there's some very specific language for anybody who's learned the the the method it's very specific to help you release it not cherish it not analyze it not try to dig it up or get it into some sort of sequence or anything like that it's a dump it's like we we're just BL you know we're naming what is bothering us and and then asking for it to be removed or if if you're more of
a higher self-oriented person you can release it but that's the idea and if you just hear my little quick description of it here on YouTube as many people have you're just going to be like that doesn't quite make sense so please before you try it come learn the full technique so that it will work for you it was life and death for me that was one of the reasons I waited so long to put this on YouTube and I've had it here since 2016 but I waited years to put it up because I really wanted
it to be the right information that saved my life and nothing less so that's why I'm such a stickler about please go you know get the book or the free course and that's why the course is free too and there's free calls every week with me and my staff that you can come to if you sign up for that course we invite you so you want to find a partner in desire marriage and you want yeah I like what you want I like your vision I like how well you've been able to name what you
want and you feel like the left behind an unwanted one that's a really normal thing to feel with trauma and where are the good guys so I have a feeling when you have processed what happened with your family now before I had the daily practice I was pretty interested in my family story and the specifics the very you know the very negative points of what had happened and it was negative some very bad things happened to me and part of my healing was expressing that you know and and accept that yeah that really happened and
I'm affected by it and then part of my healing was moving that out of the story it's no longer who I am right it's out of the story so you needed to tell me so that I could get a sense of what your trauma has been but I would say a really great goal for you is to no longer be identified with what these jerks did to their kid it's not you and sometimes when you're having a hard time you'll know you'll know what how you got that way and it's not your fault but for
you to be able to really focus us on the behaviors and the turns of thought as you do so well here this is where all your healing is I love that you're going to Toast Masters you're getting a promotion you're taking piano lessons and ballroom dancing this is so good you know I I sort of be surprised if you haven't already met somebody because you're doing this but your anger is in the way my friend this thing where you have all this anger it does need to it needs to be processed I used to hate
that word it's so touchy feeling such psycho we need to process this to me that always meant we need to talk all night about a fight that's never going to be resolved that's what I was like oh no processing not more of that I'm exhausted but processing now as I understand it is it's about taking those those experiences that are very charged for us and triggering running them through the process that allows them to be merely memories so that we can recall the memory we can say oh yeah I remember remember that happen and we
don't our heart doesn't start pounding and we get full of adrenaline and we're just like back off to the racist disregulated thoughts right so you can process this stuff through the daily practice if you like I think there are different ways that people do it but that's how I did it I just you know you get it on paper I have fear this happened to me fear they said this fear I'll never meet anybody fear I'm left behind like everything you said so beautifully in this letter could have been written as fear and resentment get
to the calls my friend if you didn't get it in the in the retreat when we were together come to the calls it's very nuanced and I'm on the I'm on Zoom every two weeks for two hours with people all over the world taking questions they're often the same questions but they're worth answering again about each person's particular context about it so that people understand this is radical you know we're we're actually like releasing these feelings we're releasing these thoughts we're not denying the feelings or thoughts we're not suppressing them we're not saying they're ridiculous
we're just getting them out on paper and having more space and there's something that I just experience my mind can do my mind can kind of move forward with something a little happier a little more robust when I can move that stuff out of the way in writing we also know that writing is a pathway for the brain that can avoid a lot of triggers that would otherwise be set off like a pinball machine when we talk about the trauma I'm one of those people people you might be too so I hope that helps you
process that anger you're doing so many things right but process that anger and the rushing through self-care you know what yeah totally is that so bad I don't know the only self-care that really really matters for me is that I write and meditate every day if I do that I will usually do the other things fairly well good enough anyway you know too if I don't do that I can barely manage anything I'm just like right back to my old limitations so thank you for this gorgeous letter matri I hope this helps I'm going to
leave everybody with um kind of a fun thing I've told you about all these classes connection boot camp dating you know relationships daily practice all of that's down in the description section but I have this very fun um free download that's called one year to heal heads up you can't heal in a year it's a thought exercise if you had to heal really fast like quick what would you do and this is to act access your your intuitive knowledge about what you need to do to heal and it can help point to one or two
things that would be very good to start on for you right now so my one year to heal exercise can be downloaded for free right there and I will see you very soon [Music]
