Sometimes, What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Insecure

We’ve written before about Complex PTSD, which is much more common than the more popularly understood kind:

PTSD, But, Well…. Complex.

Given that C-PTSD affects so many people (around 1 in 5, but really, do read the article above! It explains it better than we have room to repeat today), it seems like a good idea to share tips for managing it.

(Last time, we took all the space for explaining it, so we just linked to some external resources at the end)

What happened to you?

PTSD has (as a necessity, as part of its diagnostic criteria) a clear event that caused it, which makes the above question easy to answer.

C-PTSD often takes more examination to figure out what tapestry of circumstances (and likely but not necessarily: treatment by other people) caused it.

Often it will feel like “but it can’t be that; that’s not that bad”, or “everyone has things like that” (in which case, you’re probably one of the one in five).

The deeper questions

Start by asking yourself: what are you most afraid of, and why? What are you most ashamed of? What do you fear that other people might say about you?

Often there is a core pattern of insecurity that can be summed up in a simple, harmful, I-message, e.g:

• I am a bad person
• I am unloveable
• I am a fake
• I am easy to hurt
• I cannot keep my loved ones safe

…and so forth.

For a bigger list of common insecurities to see what resonates, check out:

Basic Fears/Insecurities, And Their Corresponding Needs/Desires

Find where they came from

You probably learned bad beliefs, and consequently bad coping strategies, because of bad circumstances, and/or bad advice.

• When a parent exclaimed in anger about how stupid you are
• When a partner exclaimed in frustration that always mess everything up
• When an employer told you you weren’t good enough

…or maybe they told you one thing, and showed you the opposite. Or maybe it was entirely non-verbal circumstances:

• When you gambled on a good idea and lost everything
• When you tried so hard at some important endeavour and failed
• When you thought someone could be trusted, and learned the hard way that you were wrong

These are “life’s difficult bits”, but when we’ve lived through a whole stack of them, it’s less like a single shattering hammer-blow of PTSD, and more like the consistent non-stop tap tap tap that ends up doing just as much damage in the long run.

Resolve them

That may sound a bit like a “and quickly create world peace” level of task, but we have tools:

Ask yourself: what if…

…it had been different? Take some time and indulge in a full-blown fantasy of a life that was better. Explore it. How would those different life lessons, different messages, have impacted who you are, your personality, your behaviour?

This is useful, because the brain is famously bad at telling real memories from false ones. Consciously, you’ll know that one was an exploratory fantasy, but to your brain, it’s still doing the appropriate rewiring. So, little by little, neuroplasticity will do its thing.

Tell yourself a better lie

We borrowed this one from the title of a very good book which we’ve reviewed previously.

This idea is not about self-delusion, but rather that we already express our own experiences as a sort of narrative, and that narrative tends to contain value judgements that are often not useful, e.g. “I am stupid”, “I am useless”, and all the other insecurities we mentioned earlier. Some simple examples might be:

• “I had a terrible childhood” → “I have come so far”
• “I should have known better” → “I am wiser now”
• “I have lost so much” → “I have experienced so much”

So, replacing that self-talk can go a long way to re-writing how secure we feel, and therefore how much trauma-response (ideally: none!) we have to stimuli that are not really as threatening as we sometimes feel they are (a hallmark of PTSD in general).

Here’s a guide to more ways:

How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)

Take care!