Do you edit your daily activities to feel “acceptable,” to the detriment of your own wants, needs, and goals? Can you see yourself clearly from the outside, on one timeline? Do you have the power to “drop out” of your brain and observe its activities as a separate observer? 

Maybe not.

Today, we’re talking about the loss of “Self” – the most flowery and easily dismissible of the CPTSD hallmarks… which might explain why we continually lose progress in trauma recovery. It’s the key to keeping your brain, behaviors, and ‘balance’ on track. The cognitive task-manager that knows what you’re here to accomplish. The center of human “purpose” and autobiographical experience. And the most elusive of the CPTSD recovery tools – especially when its been deemed “shameful” for so long. 

Let’s talk about your Self. My favorite top-down and bottom-up tool for bypassing dissociation and keeping that brain in working order. 

Uh, lot more to say about this one. My Self has been a bit conceptually Self-obsessed, as it relates to neurobiology and plasticity. Check those detailed episodes out at patreon.com/traumatizedmotherfuckers and prepare to see your brain from a management-enabling distance that allows life-managing clarity. 

It might be the best thing you’ve ever done for your Self. 

Cheers Fuckers.

Jess

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Transcript / Blog Version:

Well hey there.

So how about this trauma marathon that we’ve all been running, huh? Feels like we have touched on a lot in enough detail to get you semi-convinced you’re not the only one with a seemingly baffling life experience.

Hopefully. Also hopefully without giving too much detail to trigger you to high hell.

So it’s a delicate balance. Reminder for more details on any of these topics you can go to the full episodes that put all of this information in my head in the first place available in the Traumatized Motherfucker Blanket Fort which you can find at patreon.

com/traumatizemotherfuckers Reminder on why those shows are hidden away from the public podcasting gaze. Because there are some deregulated trauma abusers out there and we really like the feeling of a closed healing community where folks who actually get it are comfortable without anyone trying to get in our heads.

Any more than they already have so far. So, I’ll see you there if you’re interested.

But today, let’s round out this trauma summarizing effort. Finally, I have been running two podcast streams concurrently, and I am goddamn tired.

So, let’s say that you’ve fallen prey to pretty much everything we’ve covered here already. You’ve been nodding along, feeling validated, and seeing your mental health for once with clear eyes.

It’s not just you, it’s all of us. There are reasons and it’s fixable.

Cool. I hope that you feel that way at least.

Now let me ask you a question though. What do you really want in life?

And the question can’t be stability security, not to worry so much just to feel okay, or to be accepted. Those are either non conditions or unattainable human constructs that really have nothing to do with actual achievement of goals.

You also aren’t allowed to say to help others, because as we just talked about that some fawning shit turned into a martyrdom purpose. It kind of cuts you out of the whole equation, and it’s probably unhealthily based on those early narratives of needing to serve others in order to be valid.

I have to remind myself of this daily. So, try again.

What do you really want in life? What makes this PTSD education and recovery effort worthwhile?

What are you really working towards? Who for?

Who and what do you want to be? Have no idea?

Hell, if I were to ask you, what do you really want to do this afternoon during your spare time, if you had no obligations. I think a lot of us would be having the same panicky sensation of searching our entire brains for some suggestion, because we were also unprepared to answer it.

Then probably a lot of upset deliberation as every option sounds equally meh, yet guiltily terrifying, because you live life based on necessary survival functions, not your own enjoyment, experience, or interest. Am I right?

Mm hmm. So, let’s talk about this most easily written off symptom of CPTSD, if you ask me.

Loss of self. Now, as someone who honestly just does not connect well with flowery language about humanistic ideals, I have always read that, shrugged, and then just moved my attention back to how ungodly anxious and hyper vigilant I was.

I have an exploding heart and pounding head to worry about. I am so depressed that I want to die at the slightest inconvenience.

This whole identity thing never really seemed valid, you know? First of all, I always thought that I knew who I was.

I was someone, and that someone definitely made a splash for better or for worse wherever they went. No one could ever say I didn’t have opinions or a strong personality.

And secondly, I mean, who the fuck is going to worry about the fluffiness of a “sense of self” when your brain and body are screaming bloody murder every day? What’s the real issue here?

My regard for my own being or the fact that I can’t concentrate or fulfill any tasks? I mean, it seems like the second option.

But here’s the thing. How do you really start to make progress in your life?

To design an existence that you actually want rather than the one you’ve been subtly or overtly influenced to have by toxic brain pathways? If you don’t know who or what you are or strive to be, if you don’t know what’s actually important to you, what you want in life, and where you fall on the spectrum of inherently allowed to exist versus a skid mark on the history of humanity, where do you go from there?

I mean, I don’t think you really do go anywhere. I think you get trapped endlessly being kicked in circles by everyone you encounter and waiting for life to suddenly snap into a satisfying place if you wait long enough.

Without that inner sense of who you are and what you are striving for over a continuum of your life, from the inside out as much as the outside in, I really think you’re prone to falling back into the same looping, easily accessible, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral patterns that create those chemical imbalances that then fuck up your mental and physical experiences forever for the rest of your life, the cycle that we have covered so far. I think you also have no idea how to direct your brain, body, or external activities each day, and you’re prone to the suggestion of anyone and anything who is willing to control you.

Seems important, unless continual abuse is your expected life outcome. So let’s chat some more about this fake feeling concept.

Your self. So let’s first talk about how we can lose track of our self or our identity.

It happens pretty simply by always letting other people dictate our outer worlds, which also allows them to dictate our inner worlds, or vice versa. Because as we have talked about thoroughly, we are literally trained, reinforced, and punished as needed to be the social and lifestyle companions that are desired by unhealthy people.

So we’re likely to be impressionable when it comes to being told what to do. And even if it’s subtle, even if we feel like we’re calling the shots around here, we usually end up fitting into the mold of whoever we’re closest to, or whoever represents some modicum of safety or security to us.

So first of all, I want to talk about something we can lose our sense of self to a job, an educational program, society, just as much as we can lose our sense of self to an individual abuser, or that toxic family of origin. Something that demands you to rethink what you thought, reassess yourself, and redesign your experiential estimate to embody their view, rather than relying on your own perception, really has the potential to begin to degrade your sense of self.

If you ever had one to begin with. Let’s make sure that’s clear.

I think it all starts with the process of having opposing views and non-native perspectives injected into your brain, as in, you have your thoughts, and then you have your counter thoughts that other people tell you are more valid than what you originally engaged. Well, I thought I was like this, but now I’m told either I’m not, or it isn’t acceptable to be that way.

I thought I felt this way, but now I’m being told that is the wrong reaction to have. I thought this was a viable goal, but apparently I was mistaken, and I will never do it.

I thought that this event just took place, but now I’m being told it never happened at all. Yeah, so we are talking gaslighting and cognitive control tactics.

These self-defeating, self-doubting, self-abandoning cognitive redirections stack up to create a set of brain patterns that never really settle on your own beliefs as being correct or valid. Thus, constantly undermining the whole self system.

Over time, when you continually have to rely on other people to fleetingly validate you and every thought that your brain activates, never able to validate yourself or trust your own perspective, do you know what happens? You get really helpless.

You learn that you aren’t capable of making your own choices because everything you do is prone to correction and criticism. It’s all been wrong so far.

You keep showing up as a good little sidekick for everyone else instead, which also depletes your confidence to become the main character in your own story. You also spend so much time at the heels of the folks who influence you that you honestly just miss out on opportunities to build yourself regard up.

Then, without any accumulating evidence that you’re smart, worthy, and capable of leading your own life without any relationship with your self, well, what do you fall back on whenever somebody flippantly suggests that you are the opposite? It stops feeling like an option to go out and pursue your own goals eventually, even if they’re as simple as going to the pharmacy or applying for a job, just because your brain suddenly isn’t patterned to connect those dots for yourself anymore.

So the path from something simple like “I need eggs to buy eggs” might start to include something like “make sure that’s a good thing to go accomplish right now and isn’t stepping on the toes of anybody else according to so and so and such and such” You know, rather than “get in the car and drive your ass to the store to buy the fucking eggs” at least until the day that you start to just get in the car and drive your ass to the store to get the fucking eggs. In doing so, reteaching your brain that you can take action and care for your own business and actually care about it more than you care about other people’s.

And also, that that business is valid because you yourself wanted a fucking omelet and don’t need anyone to tell you that that is allowed. So I think you can probably see, this is how abusive, controlling, codependent and cognitively domineering relationships manage to whittle away at your personal motivation.

They take away your personal decision making impulse and replace it with a “check for validation and/or practical help” bottleneck at every step. An abstract obstacle that feels very concrete when it’s been transformed into a very real brain structure through repetition of at least seemingly real consequences.

Now, think about how often, every day, you are asking permission for things or putting yourself last in the course of your experiences, especially when you work a traditional job or live in any law abiding society. It’s pretty much a non-stop game of “Am I allowed to do this?

” and repetition that you often are not of high enough status to earn such basic privileges, something that again probably started being programmed in your head as the newcomer in an emotionally unhealthy family and has been reinforced by, counts on fingers, everyone who you have ever dated. Overall, you probably learned, “What did you want to do as a kid?

” It doesn’t matter, because there were other plans. “What did you want to do in your last partnership?

” Doesn’t matter, because there were other plans. “What did you even want to be when you grew up?

” Doesn’t matter, you had to be who they wanted you to be. You redirect your intentions time and time again, from the split second decisions you’re making, all the way to your long term plans over a lifetime.

It’s the only thing that’s allowed when you’re in the midst of controlling outsiders, and it has a lasting effect on your thought patterns, your brain’s ability to even do certain activities. Like, for instance, it takes away your ability for autonomy.

It erases the connection to that thing deep inside of you that’s always been there as one observing consistent energy with some sort of intended purpose. And it also hinders your ability to view yourself from the outside on one timeline, as one person, to keep all of your memories and motivations in their proper place.

However you want to define your “self” as an independent organism, a soul on this planet for some adventure or another, or just a brain that’s collected a whole lifetime of information to mold into a singular character, it’s something that we lose when we’re in the weeds of surviving and serving every day. And we forget it ever even existed when we’re bumbling through internal reactions to external chaos for decades on end.

So that’s it. That’s exactly how we lose our sense of self.

We lose our brain control, and we lose our confidence that we’re not helpless, fatally flawed passengers on this horror ride. It’s pretty familiar and depressing sounding all of a sudden, isn’t it?

Sorry. If it didn’t feel shitty yet enlightening, the information probably wouldn’t be relevant to you.

So now let’s get to the useful part and talk about what we can do about it. I think that inherent in this drive to make your brain match the brains of everyone else is the requirement to be extremely human brain compartment dominant on a systemic daily operations front.

As in, by the time you’re an adult, you are not so connected to your emotions and experiences. You’re a lot more active in your reasonable narrative primate brain in order to try to keep up with the continual demands of the think boxes all around you.

Our human world does not really enable being very body intelligent, so much as we focus on being mentally intelligent. So, as good little fauners, we spend a lot of time pumping energy into our fore brains, if we can, and forgetting as much as possible about our more rudimentary systems, like, how do I feel about this situation?

Problem being, we don’t have the best access to our prefrontal human brain, either. They’re often completely zapped of energy thanks to lower level brain functions, or just running amok trying to front in the ways that we know we need to perform as human beings.

And why do I tell you this in this conversation? Well, number one, because you will drive yourself nuts trying to use your human estimation powers to keep up with the looking glass self interpretation of what everyone else thinks of you, and trying to adapt to never disappoint them.

It’s impossible. It’ll make you completely mutable, it’ll stagnate your life, you will spin an indecisive oppositionally concentric circles every day, instead of getting anywhere.

Number two, because getting to the top down construct of self that comes from your prefrontal cortex human brain can be extremely challenging when it’s always bogged down, just trying to make enough sense of life to exist every day. Instead, you might just want to quote offload your prefrontal cortex activities to surrounding parties, so they can tell you what your head is too exhausted to think about itself.

So, who am I? I don’t know let me ask someone else, can you just regulate this entire brain system for me based on what you see and think please?

Yeah, not great. Number three, because I happen to think that one portion of this self thing is often more accessible through your body than through your higher level reasonable brain.

You’ve lost your self. I think you can find it and differentiate it through your body first, so that you can strengthen it, independent of your stupid fucking brain that allows you to then manage your brain from a different place, a more grounded rooted place in your body, instead of wrongly identifying your brain as your self.

Then you can clean out the unprocessed memories, you can change your energy and emotional state. You can even re examine and reset your lifelong intentions to align with your gut feelings, and that sense of where you’ve been and where you’re headed.

And then, when you have a clean mental space. Ideally you can reconnect with the elusive prefrontal cortex construct of self in order to create a kind of closed circuit of both what you think and what you feel tying the logical director, the executive functioning CEO into this whole lifelong story, that starts at your birth, and every day, it proceeds however you want it to until your death.

And that is where we get the power to manage our brains to spot the brain patterning that we’re carrying that never even should have belonged to us in the first place, to keep our emotions in check, and our memories accruing towards one logical story about who we actually are and where we’re going. And that is the key to this long term recovery, not just making one massive leap, and then falling down forgetting where you were headed and beginning all over again.

It is your sense of self. So there you go.

A quick introduction to talking about this construct of us, which I think exists on a bodily plane that tells you, hey, you’re still alive, and that’s actually worth something in and of itself, and also exists as a brain based conceptual one that says, and now here’s how we’re going to make the most out of it. I know it’s a little bit of a weird like spiritual kind of deviation here, and I honestly don’t give a shit how you want to look at it.

If you are into any of this karmic view or not, is not up to me. All I care about is getting the message across.

When you’re able to supervise and manage your mental landscape, operating from one continuous energy, identity or construct of self with a distance from what your brain has picked up along the way, which just hasn’t been re examined and parsed out before, instead of overly identifying with all the garbage that your dumb fucking think box has accidentally constructed into a set of destructive behavioral instructions, things will change. You will change.

The people around you will change. Your brain will change.

And from there, it is undoubtable. Your brain changes, and your life changes, because your behaviors change when your feelings and thoughts change, and your view of your own self is actually stable, steady, and one that you feel okay about.

Motherfuckers, if all of that is not what brought you here. Well then I don’t know I don’t really know how to end this whole thing.

I was banking on everyone wanting to make a better life for them, themselves. At the end of the day, I do think that that’s what we’re looking for.

We’re all looking for change that we are actually creating. It’s just felt impossible for most of us to get to that point so far without the education and support that we never got in the first chapter of our lives.

Without the power to develop our brains properly without the ability to keep our neural programs free of bugs, without the freedom to decide what we really think feel and want out of our time on this watery ball of dust. Without the reassurance that you are allowed to be you.

And actually, there is no one else for you to be.