We know, trauma brains create patterns that can stall us out and keep us stuck. This is especially true when talking “relationships” of all forms. Unfortunately, leading many to feel permanently socially-tethered, personally incapable, and suicidal, instead.

Today, let’s talk about how relationships often corrupt our lives, how to re-work them, and when it’s time to say goodbye – all for recovery’s sake. 

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Transcript / Blog Version:

Annnnd we’re back. Hope that last one wasn’t too much of a downer or fear-inspirer. Better to get prepared and get plans in place now, than to be shocked when your dad abruptly dies and you’re reimmersed in the family system, watching your brain revert to old versions that hate you. But that’s just a note from my life.

Thing is, you’ll also realize at a certain point, that it doesn’t HAVE to be your family who you feel obligated to in order for your brain to go a bit haywire. To fall back into trauma patterns or parts that you’d rather keep buried. In fact, any relationship can follow similar trends – including relationships with work and other life structures. Again, we’re programmed for being responsible for others and putting our needs on the backburner – so any situation that feels similar, may have similar results.

Not being able to leave, even though it’s fuckkking killing you slowly. Or rapidly, depending on what you’re dealing with.

The truth is, social connections of all sorts can be imprisoning when we’re aiming for recovery. In so many ways.

1) change is often punished by our comrades. People don’t like to see other people changing, it destabilizes the relationship dynamic and may loosen some of those original points of connection. They don’t know what to expect from you anymore and they’ll often react fearfully trying to get you back to original spec. We don’t want to be socially exiled or lose key connections, so we can get stuck in a place of non-recovery as people crab-bucket us.

2) bad relationships are typical around here, and they include relationships we aren’t actually ALLOWED to leave, such as family engagements… can’t abandon your children, for instance. AND they also include relationships that we just FEEL like we can’t leave – for sake of resources, morality, obligation or fear. When we’re isolated from others (common) and trauma bonded to someone (even more common) we assess that this is it. We’re stuck forever. That, in and of itself, is a trauma… which clearly won’t permit progress to be made, while still in the throws of abuse.

3) People won’t LET US leave relationships, even when we state our needs and intentions. Harassment and stalking are not isolated experiences, even when it’s being executed by family members, even though they certainly feel like it.

Any of these trends will create a sense of being held in place. Unable to make moves that are necessary for oneself. And struggling internally, knowing what one wants and needs… but being restrained from putting those practices into action. An idealized prior version of self may be the goal – but the present day version of self allowed and empowered by this relationship in question keeps being ignited, instead.

If we can’t get the other person or the relationship to change, we often just toil away in it, perpetually trying to our own detriment, anyways.

This is largely because, another important point… number 4) we assess that we aren’t capable to be on our own. We often believe we can’t support ourselves in one way or another. We can’t be safe or secure. We can’t weather our emotions on our own. We won’t have an identity without this partnership or connection. We’ll somehow be untethered from stable ground and can’t rely on ourselves to pour new goddamn cement.

And this is true across internal and external events. Sure, we assess that we can’t conquer the world alone – it’s a scary place that demands way too much of us. That’s not unfair. Especially with a lifetime of negative events to remember and extrapolate into predictions about the future.

But we also assess that we can’t manage our own internal events. That our feelings will overtake us, our intrusive memories, our various mental ailments. Our anxiety, for instance, might be the thing that holds us in a relationship dynamic, because we assume that it will escalate enormously when we leave and we won’t have someone to lean on in the ways we’ve learned to do it so far.

And that fear of self? Of our own inner worlds? Clearly enormously significant.

It’s what keeps us running from our own brains and our own potential. Rescinding our attempts to break free of prior limitations. Believing there’s no point in trying, in so many ways.

In the aftermath of all these relational conditions, we get? A lingering sense of entrapment and defeat. That’s what the literature tells us. We can’t move forward because of this relational situation, but we can’t leave the relational situation to move forward. We feel – again, just like last episode – stuck, and furthermore, defeated. There’s no move for us to make, so we just give up.

The sense of being trapped and helpless creates defeat, and defeat creates… suicidality. Yep, that’s right. That’s what the research revealed.

When we lose our sense of autonomy and control over our lives, we don’t want to keep bothering with those lives at all. And how could you blame us? It’s “wrong” or “unsafe” to leave, it’s debilitating to stay… Not to mention, we also found out that we’ll be enduring rounds of negative self-assessment in this setup. So we can shame and blame ourselves the entire time, creating cognitive depression from the inside out.

Not to mention, sense of personal incapacity doubles down our fear and avoidance. If we assess we’re unable able to do things, we don’t approach them anymore. For instance, if we’re wounded by other humans or past risks that didn’t pan out? We trim our support systems along with the richness of our existences, trying to stay safe in the future. With the result of temporarily reducing anxiety, but overall making this life no real life at all.

And then what’s a Motherfucker to do, except to apparently live in constant misery?

Well, end the constant misery with the only seemingly available answer.

Of course, it’s not the only answer. Just the way our brains share some logical patterns.

We often forget that we DO have choices. Just because we opted into something before doesn’t mean it’s a lifelong sentence. But our brains don’t like that very much. Once we establish some neural connections, we don’t like to consider blowing them apart and starting again. It’s fearful. It’s uncertain. It’s energetically costly. It requires full re-evaluation of prior choices and the ultra-expensive brain function of making new decisions. Decisions with unknowable outcomes that will spin out our t-brains.

So I think it helps to remember how hard your head tries to stay stagnant, really. Just because you aren’t seeing immediate options for your situation, doesn’t mean they exist. It means they aren’t already at the forefront of your thoughts or you’d benefit to consider new ones.

And in this case, we can end the entrapping relationship – whether that’s to a person, place, career, or idea. Just because certain roles and expectations were established originally, they don’t have to remain rigid and unchanged. We can change the dynamics with new boundaries and personal expectation standards. We can face the unknown future, flourish, and fuck right off to a whole new life.

You don’t have to feel endlessly obligated to any social connection, just because it was already established. Most likely, it was established at a time when you weren’t the same person you are now. Weren’t as healthy. Didn’t see things so clearly or know what you really needed in life. And who knows how much MORE that’s going to change, if you have conditions to allow it.

Remember, a lot of old relationships will directly oppose your attempts to positively change.

But that said… how do you handle things like this? How do you know when it’s time?

Well, first things first. We’re not looking for black and white trauma reactions here. Don’t like, cut and run on people without giving them the opportunity to change or adapt to your changes, if it’s never happened before. First, start with boundaries. Change the relationship dynamics, as you can manage. If the other party doesn’t play? Time to get more distance.

Don’t get stuck in the trauma relationship trap of feeling so tethered to someone that it’s destroying you. Especially, if the reason you stay is because you fear they can’t make it without you… or you fear that you can’t make it without them. Both of these are typical trauma patterns from our histories of having to take care of everyone, while being informed that we actually need THEM because the world is such a dangerous place and so is our own brain.

To know when a relationship is ready to die? I think you need to find out how you function without the relationship. And then you can reintroduce it to your life. Notice the changes in yourself and believe what you find. From there, you can adjust accordingly, in whatever ways the other person’s behaviors permit. Going no contact? Might be the only answer.

Remember that it IS an answer. A much better one than erasing ourselves from earth.

But we often forget just how capable we are in the midst of relationships, especially the codependent variety that often spawns from those with complex trauma. And as a result, we get into dangerous places in our own heads. Hating ourselves, doubting ourselves, and fearing ourselves. To the extent that we might feel like there’s only one escape route.

There’s not. And if you’re ever feeling this way, please reach out for help from a professional hotline. There are organizations devoted to helping us get out. Open up to someone about what’s going on. And don’t let your brain convince you that you don’t have a way to exit the situation.

You do. It just might counter everything you previously held in your perspectives.

Just remember. You aren’t alone in entrapment, defeat, suicidality, or fears of self capacity. Your brain is doing what a billion other brains have been up to all morning, welcome home. It’s just part of our common wiring.

Secondly, never forget that you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but you know what’s happened already in the past. Don’t doubt your capability to handle upcoming storms. Focus on everything you’ve handled already. And never forget the full you – the full life – that you aim to live. You aren’t trapped, you aren’t incapable of creating that existence. You just haven’t had permission before.

And this relationship, job, home, or other set of circumstances isn’t worth continuing to abandon your whole life. You’re more capable than you know, but you might have to prove it to the hardest critic. Yer own brain.

Hail your self.

Hail your future – you don’t need someone else to justify, validate, or create it. You’re stronger than you’re able to acknowledge right now.

Hail Archie, who helped teach me the same.

And cheers, ya’ll. Talk to you next week.