New Thoughts about Complex Trauma - Part 1/4

so I told you a couple weeks ago that I wanted to do a short series on new thinking that I've had around this complex trauma topic and if you're not familiar with the complex trauma is it's simply a new field of study that's come out of the PTSD and it's now being called complex PTSD and what it means it's it's not a one-time event it's an ongoing environment of danger and the reality that comes out of that or how does that affect people when they live in danger for a long period of time in other

words they're in fight flight freeze mode all the time for a long period of time what impact does that have on a child that is that lives like that and the research has shown that 97 percent of the people who end up addicts come out of complex trauma so we know one of the most prominent and powerful ramifications of complex trauma is it sets people up for drugs and alcohol because once they find drugs and alcohol they think they found the perfect way to fight flight and freeze it just solved all the problems and then

it created more problems but there's a whole bunch more stuff that has come out of that and so I teach complex trauma four or five times a week and then I read up on the latest research and so I thought it would try to pull some of that together and present it to you over the next the next few weeks I have to say though I'm nervous about doing this because what I'm gonna share with you is not going to be feel-good stuff it's gonna be here goes Tim's showing us how screwed up we are

and this is feeling overwhelming and it's very heavy and so if it gets too heavy for you you have permission to take a nap or shut your eyes or whatever you need to do but I think it's important to give a big picture on it and that's what I want to do is to give you that big picture so I want to start with a quote by one of the top researchers about complex trauma John Briere and he says if complex PTSD were ever given its due in other words if the psychological community the social

service community actually began to recognize it's important that is if the role of dysfunctional parenting in adults psychological disorders was ever fully recognized the DSM or the diagnostic and statistic manual of mental disorders which is what psychiatrists used to diagnose you it would shrink to the size of a thin pamphlet and what he is saying is that if you look in the DSM which gives all of the psych psychological disorders in his view and I would agree the majority of them come out of childhood trauma so if you took all the childhood trauma stuff away

you would end up with a DSM that was just a thin pamphlet so that is what he is putting out there so let me show you some grass about recent statistics that have been done so on the Left the annual cost of trauma so you see the cost of cancer the cost of diabetes the cost of heart disease and then the cost of trauma six hundred and some billion dollars a year in the states three times as much as all the other leading money expenditure health issues and then on the right the major cause of

death in the USA and in the world is trauma by a long shot so more and more what is becoming evident is we can't just make light of this complex trauma thing it is real and the more we research it the more profound we begin to see the ramifications that it has not just in addiction but in all areas of life so I want to give you tonight eight ways that complex trauma changes you and next week I'm gonna give you a bunch more but I couldn't fit them all into one night just because there's

just so many but I want to begin with the five senses people with complex trauma have what we call heightened senses especially sight and sound so a lot of people with complex trauma are very sensitive to noise or too light and so for them it is a very it creates a stress it creates fingers on a chalkboard feeling somebody was just telling me this week that there's a new study out that a low frequency so a low talking whisper to a person with complex trauma can trigger them and so they're still trying to figure out

why that particular sound range troubles people with complex trauma and triggers them but the point is is there's a sensitivity to certain sounds and many of you will relate to that again I just checked on research this week about physical health and so there is growing evidence through all kinds of different research agencies that cancer diabetes even allergies autoimmune deficiencies and disorders in many cases there's a connection to childhood trauma so what it is saying is childhood trauma affects your immune system childhood trauma affects your ability to handle diseases and because of the stress it

makes you susceptible to stress related sicknesses and so for many people those autoimmune things from chronic fatigue fibromyalgia lupus etc they're believing that in some cases there's a trauma route to it third one and this is now going into this psychological and I would say this is the heaviest and most painful and what I did you months ago as I was thinking about complex trauma one day I just thought what would it be like if a child grew up in a very healthy home and then I compared it to what it would be like to

a child growing up in complex trauma and what stood out to me was the contrast that there is a total opposite so in this identity what I'm talking about is the core belief about what we believe about ourselves so that is fundamental because much of what we do in life how we go about relationships how we talk to ourselves is based on what we believe at our core about ourselves for most people there's a subconscious element to that belief you're not even aware that you believe certain things about yourself and a lot of what my

job is is to help bring that subconscious awareness to a conscious awareness because only as it's a conscious awareness can you change it so in a healthy home a child is going to experience unconditional love they're going to be treated with respect they're going to be accepted with all of their Ward's and idiosyncrasies they're going to be nurtured and cared for it's going to be safe and as a result they're going to feel good about themselves they're gonna have a good self-image good self-esteem they're gonna feel valuable they're gonna feel loved all of those things

are the necessary ingredients of building a healthy life all of those things are what you would call sources of giving life to a soul they feed life into a soul now go to complex trauma there a child doesn't get unconditional love or acceptance they get abuse neglect abandonment and as a result they don't feel good enough they don't feel lovable they don't feel valuable you get that the exact opposite of what a child in a healthy home again and what I want you to understand is that that creates this hatred of self hatred of parts

of self down on themselves beating themselves up living in fear of rejection fear of abandonment fear that nobody will love them and those are what you call soul killers they prevent a healthy life they kill the soul and what they do is they create behaviors that not only destroy the soul but destroy healthy relationships or prevent healthy relationships so the very core of your being gets changed that's what I want you to see but it doesn't just get changed a little bit it gets changed to the polar opposite of what it should be and as

a result that becomes the starting place of a child with complex trauma in thinking about themselves relationships life and the world and that to me is just a super sad super heavy thing the fourth and this is what John bri-bri air was saying is much of the mental health disorders are being tied back to complex trauma so ADHD oppositional defiance disorder we've talked about depression and anxiety almost everybody with complex trauma has depression anxiety OCD BPD NPD di D so it's borderline personality narcissistic personality and dissociative identity disorder tied back to complex trauma and what

we have seen is the more severe the trauma the more severe the brain has to respond to survive and so that's where you get into the borderline personality the narcissistic the dissociative identity the psychopath that's the extreme end of that so tie that to the previous one when the core of a child who's gone through a stream abuse their core says I must be absolutely totally unlovable to be treated this way but who can live with that realization and so they block that and try to overcompensate and you get the narcissist that says I'm better

than everybody I think I'm wonderful and I think everybody adores me you get the psychopathy that says I have no feelings no emotion I don't know about love I have no remorse I've shut everything down everything is about using people all out of complex trauma now the next one problems pain hurts and losses in a healthy home every single one of those in they're all negative things they all create negative emotions but every single one of them can be resolved so you would get in a healthy home parents that would love them and support them

and give them the tools to handle it and they would deal with it yes it would initially cause them some fear but the parents would support them encourage them and they would gradually get through it and come out the other side and have grown from it and it turned into a positive and so they don't see problems or pain as permanent things or as bad things they see them as resolvable things and opportunities for growth that's within a healthy home it's a resolvable thing now let's go to complex trauma exact opposite pain hurt losses unresolvable

they try to resolve them but nobody gives them tools nobody supports them so they stride to resolve the pain and the problem and the hurt and the loss and they get more pain and they get more hurt because they don't know how to resolve it and it only makes matters worse and then they get family that gets mad at them for how they've acted and that that makes it even more painful and eventually they come to the place where they go pain problems losses all are bad and the only thing to do when those things

come along is fight flight or freeze there's no other way to deal with it they are not resolvable and so they stuff it they medicate it they run away from it but they remain a victim of it because they are not able to solve it it still affects them that is tragic because what is happening with all that unresolved stuff is it's just piling up it's just adding to pain upon pain it is just adding to a belief that problems and losses and hurts are all bad to be avoided at all cost and that is

a tragic way to live next one tied to that is emotions so again a couple of things in a healthy home the majority of the emotions of a child in a healthy home are positive they experience love they experience joy contentment because their physical needs are met their emotional needs are met and hopefully they get their spiritual meet needs met and all of those things create a pattern and an environment where joy and contentment can grow and flourish and then when they do have a negative emotion they're able to solve the problem and return to

a positive emotion so negative emotions happen but they don't stay there too long they are dealt with and returned to a positive in that home as well when there are negative emotions parents don't punish them or shame them for crying or being afraid or having it they nurture them comfort them validate their emotion and their experience and then help them solve solve it complex trauma the exact opposite number one mainly negative emotions constant hurt constant neglect abuse abandonment all kinds of problems that they can't solve depression anxiety fear anger guilt false guilt all positive or

negative emotions those are the predominant and the majority of their emotional world next thing they can't resolve it they can't fix their guilt they can't fix their fear they can't fix their anger and nobody is helping them and so they try to either deny those things stuff them or hardened their heart big time that is their only way of dealing with it but in doing so they kill their own soul they become a lifeless soul in a physical body and those are the results of those things and then sadly because all of those negative emotions

have been the majority and they've never been able to resolve it after a while they don't even know what to do when they get a positive emotion it freaks them out and in their brain they go this isn't going to last the other shoe is about to drop so let's sabotage any positive emotion and return to negative because the least we know what to do there and so now they don't even allow or they're afraid of positive emotions or do they go to the other extreme they get a positive emotion and they go this I

have a ride let's forget about recovery and let's just act impulsively without thinking because we feel so good and they make a lot of impulsive but bad decisions so that is their emotions now let's move to the brain to thinking in a healthy home the goal of a parent in training a child is that the child we'll think and see things accurately and that all distortions will be cleared up so that they will have an accurate view of themself life others happiness relationships everything that is the goal but more than that the parents just don't

want to tell the children what to think they want to teach the children how to think for themselves they want to teach them how to weigh out pros and cons to think through problems and process them to a healthy conclusion and they work away at all of those things so over time the child is growing in their knowledge of the world of themselves of life and they are given the freedom to explore topics of interest they might find a fascination with the Stars so they're introduced to astronomy and they're allowed to learn about that you

realize in complex trauma when you're in survival mode you get tunnel vision you're not allowed to think about astronomy because you got to survive today you're not allowed to just think about a hobby because you got to survive and then you're constantly bombarded with distortions from mom and dad and you got to twist your brain to try to live with all of the different things that are happening to you and you got to deny and minimize just to survive and so in complex trauma it takes your beautiful brain and it uses it to distort everything

in order to survive and as a result that's your go-to is distorted thinking more than that what they are finding is that some children with extreme trauma are so survival mode tunnel vision that they end up with cognitive and learning disabilities they have trouble learning because they've never thought outside the box of their tunnel vision and they don't know how to process in a different area than just survival and that is a sad reality and then often if you had a dad it was like a military general he didn't care about teaching you how to

think he just wanted you to think what he thought and he told you what to think and you were in trouble if you ever disagreed with him and so you weren't trained to think of different ideas and perspectives and to weigh them all out and come to a personal decision about what you're gonna do and believe so complex trauma takes that brain and gets it to the exact opposite of what it was designed to be isn't that kind of sad maybe overwhelming one more and then I'll be done default setting and what I mean by

a default setting is where do I naturally go to in my life if I'm not working on myself so for many people from complex trauma if you're not working on your recovery every day you go back to self-pity you go back to fear you go back to anger that's your default that's your go-to that's you in autopilot okay so those default settings are often subconscious you're not even aware that that's where you naturally gravitate when you're not working on yourself another part of your default is not just what emotions do you go to and what

thoughts do you go to but what are your patterns of behavior so for some people their pattern if they're not working on themselves is they begin to isolate they begin to drift back to old friends all of those patterns so you have default thinking default emotions and default patterns complex Trump our child in a healthy home most of those patterns in thinking emotions and people behavior patterns are positive you end up in a fairly good place complex trauma you end up in a negative place you end up depression anxiety worry hard on yourself lots of

Inger lots of guilt lots of negativity that's where you go everything is negative so complex trauma takes your default setting which should have been positive and makes you constantly gravitate to a negative place now what's important about that negative place two things number one it takes you to your limbic brain and when you're in your limbic brain all of those things lead to self-destructive behaviors all of that comes out of complex trauma some of you're gonna go sign up for react right after this because you are saying wow I got some work to do so

let me just end with this next week I want to give you the latest research about methods of treatment that are that are being found to be helpful okay so here's what I'm gonna give you today in my opinion I think you can see it the journey to healing from complex trauma is not for the faint of heart I don't know a more difficult journey that one can take than to heal from complex trauma and so I expect people on a weekly basis to think about quitting and giving up and saying what's the point this

is too hard will I ever be done this it is not an easy journey but let me add this to have been raised in an environment that is death giving does not mean that it's a death sentence there is a way out it takes a ton of work but there is a way out so that goes to the next one you should be agree about having complex trauma but don't stay there forever because what happens when you stay there forever is you stay a victim and you just want to blame everybody Healing comes when I

say I had no control about what happened to me I was a child trying to survive and the methods of coping that I chose to survive I didn't know they were gonna mess up my adult life but now I take ownership for my decisions today to do it differently I don't have to keep following those old patterns I'm not gonna blame anymore I'm going to accept responsibility to change that's where you have to begin and that is hard because you're gonna go through a time of grieving and anger as you realize what complex trauma has

done and I just want to end with this and I'm not just blowing smoke people that I know that have worked hard on their complex trauma I think they have a beauty that people who grew up without a lot of difficulty they have a beauty that those don't have there's something that that hard work and all of that pain builds into them in a beauty and a strength of soul that nobody else will ever get so that if you're able to hang on to that and continue this journey I really hope you can the question

that came for me after thinking about the first half is can God use somebody that's so screwed up and I think I hear that question once in a while I talked to clients who get kind of interested in serving and serving God and then they look at themselves and they go maybe there's just a whole bunch of better people that could do a better job and maybe I'm just too messed up to be used and so they kind of talked themself out of it before they even think of putting themselves up out there so I

want to give you a story tonight about one of the most messed up people that we know of in the Bible now the Bible as you've seen has lots of messed up people and that's one of the things I like about the Bible is it doesn't try to candy-coat its Saints it's lets you see them warts and all and though most of the ones that God used in a great way they had lots of issues and it does not gloss over those or hide that and so the point in the Bible is this God specializes

in using messed up people so the guy we're gonna talk about his name is Jeff thaw you can just call him Jeff if that helps you but he comes at a time in Israel's history just before they had kings or a monarchy so before that time they were twelve separate tribes each kind of operating on their own and so they would have what was called judges and they were the leaders of that particular tribe or a couple tribes but it was a time in Israel's history where they just drifted further and further away from God

and jephthah is one of the guys that is called upon to be a judge and to rescue the people of Israel and to help them get sorted out again so let me just read you a little bit of his background it says now Jephthah of Gilead was a great warrior he was a son of gilead but his mother was a prostitute Gilley Ed's wife now you got to know that's not the prostitute okay so there's a prostitute and his wife also had several sons and when these half-brothers grew up they chased Jephthah off the land

you will not get any of our father's inheritance they said for you are the son of a prostitute so Jephthah fled from his brothers and lived in the land of table soon he had a band of worthless rebels following him so let me tell you from that a little bit about Jeff the number one born to a prostitute and then his his mother the prostitute doesn't want him she takes him back to the guy she slept with and said this is your kid you take care of him so he goes back to Gilead the father

now can you imagine when Gilead comes home with this new kid what his wife was going to say and where did this little boy come from and then the tension in the marriage when she learned of his sexual indiscretions and cheating on her and so she rejects the boy as well wants nothing to do with him and then trains her natural biological children to know that their half-brother is not their full brother but is the son of a prostitute and they reject him now what's significant to me is the father could have stepped in and

he go to say stop it this is my son he will not be rejected he is a full-fledged member of this family but he does not step in and so jephthah would have been rejected by his prostitute mom his stepmom his stepbrothers and his father and then he goes off and we're told it becomes a gang leader he starts his own gang it says of worthless fellows so he's into bad stuff is the point now based on what you know of complex trauma when a kid goes through that much rejection and abandonment think of the

issues that he's got he would just have this huge wound in his soul his heart would have been crushed because if you boil it down nobody loved him nobody wanted him everybody saw him as a burden everybody saw him as scum so he would have felt unlovable he would have have all that shame stuff he would have had huge anger issues huge fear of abandonment issues like this guy who had issues on issues because he experienced one of the meanest messiest childhoods going so then we come to what happens next and it's about 15 years

later so he's been a gang leader involved in crime and all kinds of stuff but it sounds like somewhere in there he began to do some good stuff to protect the people of that area and so word begins to get spread that this Jeff the guy has kind of turned his life around a little bit and then we're gonna find that he actually connects to God and he decides to follow God and so where he grew up was being attacked by a foreign army and they were getting demolished and they were in pain and trouble

they were losing crops and animals women are being raped and they're desperate for help and they think who can help us and they go Jeff the Kent so they send a group to go and talk to him so it says about this time the ammonites began their war against Israel when the ammonites attacked the elders of Gilead that's Jeff his dad sent for Jephthah in the land of top they said come and be our commander help us fight the ammonites now how would you respond to people that are rejected you called you names wanted nothing

to do with you and now when they're in trouble they're asking you to come and help them you would have given them the finger but Jeff's aside to them aren't you the ones who hated me and drove me away from my father's house why do you come to me now when you're in trouble he calls them on it but he goes and he rescues them okay now here's what I want you to see he did just before he goes into battle so the story is a victory okay but there's a sad part to this story

so it says this Jephthah made a vow to God he said and this fur goes into battle if you give me victory over the ammonites I will give you to the Lord whatever comes out of my house to meet me when I return and triumph and I will sacrifice it to you as a burnt offering so he goes and fights against the ammonites and the Lord gave him victory and then he comes home and when jephthah returned home to Mizpah his daughter came out to meet him playing on a tambourine and dancing for joy she

was his one and only child he had no other sons or daughters so guess what he did sacrificed his dog now before you kind of get too far in your thinking I want to back you up and help you understand the subs story that is necessary to understand to appreciate this story and understand that God uses messed up people but there's a piece that you have to understand okay so here is what happened in Israel during the time of the judges they had this repeating pattern and I think it's about 18 times this pattern repeats

so things are going well they get rescued from their enemies life is peaceful prosperity starts to return everything is good and just like many of us we go thank you God for rescuing us you can go on a vacation now we're good and they forget all Oh God and as a result they start to drift from God and then God says okay here's some painful consequences now God doesn't do that to be mean he does that to get their attention so that they will say this is not a good path to go down because it's

leading to more and more pain and so they go down on what's interesting to me is as they go down this path sometimes once the pain begins so an enemy starts to attack them and oppress them and conquer them sometimes it took up to 15 to 20 years before they'd finally call out to God again for help you would think that after the first month of being in pain they'd say okay God we need you we're sorry we shouldn't have taken our well back but they hung on to fifteen to twenty years doesn't that sound

familiar we just hang in the pain hoping we can find a way to make it okay but it just keeps getting worse and finally when they hit a bottom they cry out to God again now you would think God would get tired of that and say you know what I'm tired of you guys crying out to me whenever life gets painful and then forgetting about me as soon as I rescue you but each time he bailed them out and he sent a judge a deliverer and he put his spirit on the judge to give them

special insight wisdom courage all of those things and they defeat the oppressor and then it says the land has rest for X number of years and then because the land is rest they forget about God and the cycle repeats okay now here's the part I want you to see you see the cycle okay what the book of Judges shows us is every time they go through the cycle society overall gets a little worse and the next time society gets a little worse and the next time society gets a little worse and you all know by

the time you get to the couple judges who are jephthah and Samson you get people that get them out of trouble but they are so messed up because their society and their lives are so messed up they also do a lot of damage and that is the sad part of the story of Judges is every time you go through excuse me through the cycle you get a society that's worse and you get a smaller and smaller pool of healthy people to draw on to rescue the nation until you get to Jeff then Samson's time and

there's no healthy people left and you only have really messed up people and they do a little bit of good but they also do some damage so let me take you to the Jeff this story because what has happened with this slide is every time they go through it the religion it's a little worse they come back to God but they bring idolatry as well and other religions and it gets all blended the moral life of the country gets a little bit worse they come back to God but yet the morals and the sexual life

of the country is lower than it's ever been it's interesting when you get to the end of Judges you find in that time and some day I'll talk about it it is absolutely bizarre the type of stuff that was going on there were gang rapes happening everywhere there was revenge things that where they cut people's bodies up and mailed them out to all over Israel it was just bizarre so the morals went down the military got weaker more instability overall in the government so well the point is this in the early days the enemy was

all external but as society got worse and worse the greatest enemy was an external the greatest enemy was internal and that is the story of Judges and most of you can relate to that so the problem then when you have a small small pool of healthy people left is you get most of the people who up in the leadership because they care but they have character flaws so great they can overcome them I say this with the utmost respect I talked with an indigenous leader and he says as I watched the generation since their residential

schools so now we're into a multi generation the generation that follows this generation is worse than the one before and then the next one is worse than that one before and then the next one is worse than the one before we are getting to a place where we can no longer rescue ourselves with our own people and I get that because that's the story of judges and they were trying to do that so Jephthah and samson so what is Samson he was a he-man with ashy weakness he loved prostitutes he loves sleeping around he was

full of anger and revenge and he did so much damage to the name of God but he rescued Israel but he was messed up big time and Jessa had a heart for God and he loved his people but he had bought an inn and hadn't gotten over some of the idolatrous practices of child sacrifice and he got into that and he sacrificed his daughter and so here's the point that I want you to get if you're super complex trauma messed up God wants to use you and he will use you but it puts extra emphasis

on the need to keep working on yourself because you don't want to be a Jephthah that helps others but destroys your own family you don't want to be a Samson that helps others but it has a personal life that is disastrous keep working on yourself and so what we see when Jesus came into the world was a society that was so messed up they could no longer help themselves and so he came in one person and what did he do he picked 12 and he said I'm going to mentor these 12 and I'm going to

teach them healthy and I'm going to help them get past their character flaws so that they can then go and rescue their nation and that is his emphasis you don't start by just spreading the news you start by working on yourself and the more you work on yourself the greater you can help others and the greater a blessing you will be so I love the story of Jeff though because it gives hope but it gives a warning it says God wants to use you but don't forget to work on yourself