This is the blogged version of the public podcast episode of the same name!

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See you in the Blanket Fort and Cheers, y’all!

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My Fuckers. Welcome back! And thanks for being here to learn about what’s been roughing up your relationships for a while now.

Last month we talked about some of the obstacles to forming authentic, connective, healing relationships when we have histories of PTSD. Of course, we have complex feelings about letting other people in to our worlds. We’ve learned to be suspicious and self-protective. Those trends start early on in life, and we might even be able to trace our disorganized attachment to specific events with our caregivers.

Then, down the line, we tend to receive additional confirmation that humans = danger when our later relationships are similarly patterned. And we end up validating our own fears about our species and revealing ourselves to it, creating self-limiting programs that stop us from connecting with others. Which, unfortunately, means we’re not healing our trauma… we’re living in the rigid, self-defensive, aftermath of it.

So this month, we’re talking about the depths of the “having a successful social life” issue. From your insides, out.

The key point being: with these childhood experiences, memories, and unmet needs under our skulls, we don’t stand much of a chance of forming healthy relationships. UNTIL we do something that most of us spend our entire lifetimes avoiding.

We have to get vulnerable, intimate, and trusting enough with ourselves to explore, acknowledge, and understand the childhood relationship demons we’re still carrying.

Otherwise, we’re pretty well doomed to project our pains onto others, shut down our interactions for the sake of keeping our nasty bits hidden from them and ourselves, and recreate cycles of abuse that validate the unresolvable nature of our unmet needs and fucked up core beliefs about being unworthy.

In doing so, we create vicious cycles of confirming our childhood traumas as being “about us” and therefore believe we have no chance at ever breaking the bad relationship pattern. We give up and accept whatever we get – zero relationships, or abusive ones.

Meaning, it’s mandatory to understand your own inner wounds from childhood and beyond before you can relate to others in the ways that trauma recovery psychology says we should. We quite literally can’t be externally vulnerable, intimate, or trusting if we can’t even do the same within ourselves.

So the problem all starts with our upbringings. As we forge our way into toddlerdom, our task is to understand ourselves as being separate from others. Our brain first begins to realize that we are different entities from our parents. That means, we need a fundamental understanding of who and what we are, if we are not our caregivers.

And this is where we start sucking up all the information we can gather from other people. We read into their interactions with us and take the data that’s being presented as reflections of us. We use the ways that others treat us to form conscious ideas about ourselves, our identities, and our worth.

Which is problematic, because we’re forming personality templates and self-judgements based on these early life relationships, while not accurately realizing that those relationship dynamics are actually presenting information about them, our caregivers.

We take their projections – who THEY believe we need to be, based on their own histories – and bring them internally, into our own cognitive structuring and belief system.

We learn who we “are” and who we’re “supposed to be” to compensate for our assumed weaknesses and capitalize on our learned strengths.

And we learn to hide the aspects of us that have received punishment in those relationships. Deciding that these are unacceptable characteristics, thoughts, feelings, and memories to reveal to others.

This is how we form conscious identities – templates for who we strive to be. And unconscious identities – schemas and particular characteristics that we try to repress ourselves from being.

Problem is, all of them contain a lot of fear, self-judgment, self-scorn, and uncertainty. They don’t feel authentic to us, because they aren’t – they’re learned expressions and oppressions of us. And they feel dangerous to question or explore more deeply, since our brains have been increasingly assessing these hidden and preferred identities as “necessary for survival” since our early days of conscious awareness.

We NEEDED to be certain people in order to gain the love, support, and life-giving resources of our caregivers early on. And that has left a lasting impression. We feel like questioning who we present ourselves as, and what aspects of us lie masked below the surface, will cause the world to crumble. First, by causing us to crumble. And then by revealing our worst parts to other people.

Now, when we connect with someone closely, we have a major issue. Those unwanted characteristics and repressed identities are still inside of us. Unfortunately, relationships are a fast track to bringing them to the surface… and we know it. We’ve all seen it by now, amiright?

I can tell you, my relationships don’t make me feel especially proud of who I end up being. All the trauma reactions come up. The domestic nature of my trauma means close, connective, daily relationships get filtered through the family of origin framework, and suspicious, tense, insecure relationship dynamics are highly likely to develop.

Plus, being highly trauma informed means I’m even MORE afraid of transmitting my bullshit to others. I feel responsible to spare everyone from the inevitable stress and full-personality-reveal. And I’ve assessed myself as “probably not relationship material yet” because of it.

So, if we can’t confront all the personality aspects and trauma programmings we carry internally, but have a well-informed sense of responsibility for our actions as they can affect others, we don’t have too many options. We either protect everyone from that feared event by having none relationships, or by staying distant and shut down in relationships.

And this is where our “parts” really come in.

Back to that Internal Family System conversation we’ve been having. Hit up those episodes if you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.

Those repressed, often subconscious, portions of us are our Exiled parts. We don’t want them to emerge in relationships, because we don’t want them to emerge, period. We hide them from us, let alone letting others see them. Our Exiles often want relationships, because they’re still holding unmet needs that were supposed to be fulfilled by our early caregivers. But they’re also scarred by the memories of having those needs used weaponized against us by our families of origin and beyond. So we can’t see our own unfulfilled needs, relationship pains, OR fears of humans as we repress these portions of our memories. They just fester away and pop up at the worst times, as we’re triggered in a historical way to suddenly recall the rejection, neglect, and abuse experienced at the hands of others.

Meanwhile, our Protective Manager parts are the conscious, most acceptable, identities we’ve formed. We want those to be seen, and only those. They’re to some extent aware of the subconscious identities that they’re attempting to compensate for, and do everything possible to shield against the threat of those undesirable personality aspects becoming revealed. So we expect and require our Manager parts to be validated by others, to prove to ourselves that this is who we really are. “We’re fine!” Meaning, if those templates aren’t validated continually, we’re deeply challenged by the relationship, because it challenges our own safety and worthiness. Therefore, our Protector parts use unfair, self-defensive tactics to try to manage our partner’s perception of us… and our perception of ourself. Leading to an array of issues, such as projection, stonewalling, and strategic withdrawal.

And all the while… our Distractor parts show their faces to inject chaos, numbing, and trauma bonding into the relationship, so it can keep chugging along despite the inner tumult being created by the Manager and Exile fights taking place. Having some less-favorable aspects of self coming to the awareness of everyone in the relationship? Feeling overwhelmed, emotionally flooded, recollectively triggered, and discombobulated by your own relational behaviors? Welp, your system can always create NEW problems to distract from the REAL issues taking place. Get drunk, disassociate into a screen, start a brand new “red herring” fight, or create life chaos that forces everyone in the relationship to band together. And hey – no one is looking at your unwanted parts anymore. Including you.

So with all of this going on, what chance do our relationships have?

Not much. We’re doomed to replay power dynamics, strategic interpersonal rejections, self-sabotaging habits, and repetitive abuses in our partnerships.

And then use the unsuccessful attempt as additional evidence of our inability to be in relationship. OR, as evidence that “we only attract abusers” – externalizing the problem to be an uncontrollable mishap that dominates our lives.

Either way, missing the real point. We’re not completely responsible for our relationship challenges. We aren’t incapable of change. We aren’t inherently unworthy or broken. We aren’t monsters. Our repressed personality aspects aren’t evidence that we need to keep ourselves safely encaged away from the rest of the species forever.

But we’re also not innocent victims of relationships. We don’t “just happen” to fall into the same dynamics time and time again. We aren’t incapable of recreating abuse, ourselves. Either, becoming the abuser, or projecting our Exiled wounds onto others so THEY eventually become the abuser. For instance, coming from a neglectful upbringing and now being unable to see the ways our partners ARE there for us in the present, creating an anxious attachment that gives them all the power and creates an imbalanced dynamic.

We’re responsible for what we bring to our relationships. And, unfortunately, that means we have to be well-acquainted with the conscious and unconscious aspects of us before the relationship… as well as being very open to discovering MORE about those parts throughout the relationship.

We need to be self-accountable. Which means we need to have internal vulnerability, intimacy, and trust, to acknowledge all these pieces of us. All our unmet needs, our accurate and inaccurate self-judgments, our self-defense strategies which can be very conflictual, numbing, or self-sacrificial.

We need to be aware of our preferred projection of self, as well as the parts that we don’t want anyone to see. To understand their pains and the ways they require us to try to manage others, so we can avoid that pain.

Otherwise, we’re doomed to recreate it, over and over again.

Or, to withdraw from the species, so we can avoid the looping stories of relationship defeat and self-disappointment.

So, doing deep, ongoing, inner work – all the way into the subconscious – is a necessary part of successful and healing relationships. Or else we’re fated to fall into “mutual hellscapes with unresolvable conflict” with others, as both of our preferred and repressed identities bounce off of each other, creating spiraling cycles of mutual destruction that no one understands or has the tools to rectify.

And that’s what we’ll be talking about next month.

Yes, you need to be aware of YOUR parts and how they’re replaying past dynamics in the present. But let’s not forget that THEY – the relationship partner – is showing up with parts of their own.

And considering how traumatized motherfuckers primarily bond with other traumatized motherfuckers… that means, a lot of unhealed childhood wounds, points of self-hatred, and poor senses of self slamming up against each other, triggering repressed and protective parts to the forefront for both partners. Locking them in personal hellscapes, as their early traumas are ripped wide open and recreated between each other.

Nice, light, topic as we move into June, huh?

Well, we’re going to do our best to provide therapeutic remedies to these trauma relational mishaps, including how to disarm your Protector parts, safely reveal your Exiles, engage in compassionate listening, and use nonviolent communication to circumvent defensive conversations and control tactics.

But before we get to those external relational points, don’t forget. It’s critical to get into contact with your own internal pain points, first. Know what you’re bringing to the relationship before you’re shocked and alarmed, seeing undesirable aspects of yourself exploding to the surface as your brain attempts to validate its oldest wounds through parental surrogates. And understand how your protective, wounded, and distracted parts relate to each other, before they’re creating helpless-feeling cycles with another.

Dive into the full research and the community recordings on the topic over at patreon.com/traumatizedmotherfuckers. I gotta say, it’s a great month of shows. A lot of “oh fuck, that’s ME!” moments await. Also consider practicing revealing your repressed parts’ fear, self-judgments, and relationship misgivings in the private Discord group – where everyone is working on doing the same. Mentoring each other and lessening the shame around “unacceptable” pieces of ourselves that it turns out… a lot of Fuckers hold and have worked through. Hit them up for support, advice, and safe disclosure.

And if this episode or podcast stream so far has explained something notable to you about the mystery of your relationship history and resulting distress, I’d appreciate your support through patreon, ko-fi, paypal, or playing the ratings game. This project is possible thanks to community support. Help feed this MF and share the message, so the show can keep providing real, applicable, unfucking fluffy, CPTSD information around the world. Every action helps.

And thanks for being here. Learning about your brain. Confronting what’s easier to ignore, so you can break the trauma cycle and create a better life for you – and all your relationship partners. Internal VIT takes bravery. And the horrifying hope that what you’ve always needed is actually possible.

Hail your Self.

Hail Archie.

And cheers y’all.