It’s the public summary of our work from the past month!

The filthiest words: love yourself. 🤮 Why does trauma create barriers between us and… not hating us? Talkin’ lost relationships, criteria for love, loss of self, and the endless self scrutiny created by post-traumatic judgments.

It’s a BIG EPISODE with some BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS – grab your pepto and let’s talk about “self-love-y.”

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Transcript:

Fuckers! We’re back.

Today to discuss the brutal reality of what stands between us and us, in the plight for actual self-love after trauma. First some quick bidness.

My name is Jess, I have complex PTSD and maybe some unusual access to my subconscious, as well as a background in academic biomedical research. So I try to use that combo to help people understand what the fuck their brains are doing and how that’s different from who they really are.

These episodes that start with a number, period, number are the monthly rundowns of the big work that is released weekly over at patreon. com/traumatizemotherfuckers.

But here in the public reports, I give you a short summary of what we’ve been covering in detail on Patreon, so that you can come learn more with us, or not. That’s patreon.

com/traumatizemotherfuckers to come hang out and support this one human, hardest thing I have ever done in my life, week after week project. And on that note, yeehaw, I am exclusively making video podcasts now of graphics and moving pictures, not my face or my whiteboard, and they’ve been getting a lot better.

It’s been a learning process on the fly, give me a break. But they’re now illustratively fun to watch, and they’re available at every level of subscription.

And with this release from trying to use only words to describe the ineffable, the episodes are now 50-75% shorter than my long ass shows were previously. So if you have attentional issues, good news fucker, I’m trying to cater to the trauma-derived ADHD, ADD, and state of the modern world problems.

Head in, stare at a screen for 15-30 minutes, or listen and take these slide pictures for later, and get back to whatever the fuck you’re dealing with in real life. Now, some less good news.

Do not subscribe to any Patreon on your iPhone or iPad application. Thanks to the vampires at Apple, it will now cost you 30% more.

So I’ve kept everything as cheap and accessible as not really possible, but I’ve done it anyways. And I know this is a huge pain in the ass, but I encourage you to avoid this upcharge and subscribe on your PC or web browser on your phone.

That way, on my Patreon at least, it stays a mere $5 a month. One quarter of one adult dollar per month.

If you’re subscribed already, your sub pricing is not supposed to change. But I do encourage you to check your bill across all of your subscriptions, because if you have a payment issue and need to resubscribe, I think you’re going to be getting boned by that new Apple upcharge.

So watch out. Again, my apologies for the overlords who run our lives and control our bank accounts.

And also, speaking of Patreon, I’ve been uploading all the old episodes from the pre-Patreon times because they are officially offering organizational tools on Patreon that have been long awaited. As I’ve said before, it seems like that company was run by a handful of raccoons in a trench coat, but it does seem to finally be improving with new features.

So little by little, the full catalog of episodes from 2019 until today is becoming available. Regularly check out the collection called “Oldies” and find shows that are much more emotional, personal, I would say kind of feminine-minded, and generally about attachment, anxiety, post-relationship recovery, early CPTSD findings, and early challenges being around family before I really knew exactly how holistically fucked my less loud family members were.

I am uploading these episodes bit by bit. They are not announced by email because that would be goddamn annoying.

So check out that collection often. I also want to assure you that if you do subscribe, I have rejected the option for political ads to run on the show.

So you do not have to hear about the propaganda while you learn about your own trauma. And lastly, I suppose I will break this seal and make my first announcement.

Your bitch is teaching at the university level in a couple of weeks for the fall B term. They asked.

I said, okay, so you can now rest assured that I’m not a complete idiot talking out my ass on the internet for those with institutionalized authority misbeliefs. AKA, I got to tell you that professors tend to be intelligent in a very small specialized slice of existence.

And that’s about it. But hey, if you need a title to allow yourself to hear a human being, well, there’s some authoritarian trauma you might want to look into.

And I’m guessing you’ve had a narc in your life, but also, all right, I get it and fine. I’m doing it.

Great. Great.

With that happening though, the secondary back to basic series that I’ve been putting out simultaneously for free weekly has slowed on down because sanity. But I do plan to get back to it when I’m not working three to five jobs and planning a move across the country to survive winter in this RV.

So, all right, breathe through the stress. Now let’s get into our monthly report.

We left off talking about the need for self compassion, the necessity for more than education, which can quickly turn into self monitoring in trauma recovery. If you’re like me, the early stages of learning about CPTSD are relieving and they encourage some self kindness and care.

There’s a reason why I’m like this. I have been through some shit.

My experiences were real and I guess they do matter. And then, you know, you also realize that your programming kind of makes you highly responsible for dealing with your own brain because you can’t expect the world to bend over backwards for your trauma.

But that responsibility becomes much more of the focus and it can become a bit obsessive, trying to fix yourself by watching and correcting your stupid brain at every turn, which gets rather harsh and self judging and perfectionistic. So that fleeting bout of self kindness and compassion from early recovery can disappear as you’re possibly focusing on all the ways you’re still not quite right or struggling in areas in which others move with ease.

And you also may have found new ways to scorn yourself based on the education you receive about the people around you. If they are delusional abusers and you learn that tends to create more delusional abusers, you might get very caught up in trying to spot your own ailments as a side effect of learning about the personality problems of others, as well as learning about the human propensity for projection.

If I’m seeing this in them, doesn’t that mean I’m actually the source of this judgment? And pretty soon you can’t have a single thought without flipping that thought around on yourself and endlessly assessing if you are unknowingly a monster.

Yes, how education can set you free or create a whole new cognitive prison instead of neuroses for you. That dangers of being a thinker.

So we took several steps back and spoke about the necessity, the crucial nature, the requirement for self-compassion in recovery, or else you just end up abusing yourself and in fact, might get more traumatized rather than less as you destroy your own sense of self and self-esteem from the inside out. Piggybacking off our discussion of this self-compassion, this month we jumped into the deep end and started talking about feeling fondly about yourself.

Self-love, self-love, self-love, I think they call it. I know, gross.

My butthole just puckered as well. So we began this whole long painful stabby series on allowing and encouraging self-love, including why the fuck we can’t engage in self-love and why those seem like such disgusting foreign words to even speak aloud.

The learned obstacles between us and liking us. Here’s what we’ve covered so far in significant detail.

Lost relationships in the form of family and romantic, the qualifications that we’ve accepted for receiving and giving love, having no place to put our self-love because we have disbanded our sense of self and inherent in that problem. We’ve spent a great deal of time talking about rejecting past versions of us for both being too much and being too little.

Let’s talk about these points briefly here. Of course, we all know we’ve been informed that we are not good enough.

We have our own beliefs about necessary criteria for love and feel that we may be lacking. And we’ve often lost relationships that were foundational love experiences.

Without those relationships, we estimate that we don’t deserve it. We don’t know how to give it to ourselves and don’t know how to replace the relationship that’s been lost to receive it again, at least not healthily or safely.

As such, it’s to our benefit to explore our early love relationships, our families of origin, first friendships and romantic experiences. Hang on, let’s gay that last point up.

All right, better. And we need to do this to better understand if there are false standards or qualifications or relationships that we believe are required for receiving love, which we have accepted as reality and have been holding against ourselves ever since.

Most of us probably have these problems. It pits us against us against an idealized version of us that may have never even existed.

Or it pits us against us in a certain relationship, which may be was completely fucked from the start. Possibly we’re hung up on that relationship because we’ve been directly informed that this was the option for love in our lives.

No one else would ever do it. That’s abuse.

And it echoes convincingly until we shut down those narratives. And also, we need to be mindful of the fact that we don’t need other people involved to accidentally banish love from our lives.

We can create self love obstacles for us based on our own self judgments, especially as we look into the past and attempt to understand ourselves across time and traumas. Let’s take this color scheme to hell.

There it is. Some of the long term takeaways following trauma are I’m to blame.

I’m the worst. I have no value.

Something is unfixably wrong with me. I am unlovable.

And that can be the accepted narrative following relational or impersonal event based traumatic events. I actually feel for the little heart animation here.

And all of this is why I’m always saying beware the motherfucking aftermath y’all. Here’s how it works.

There’s a big event. You get through it.

There’s some calm and relief. And then some time passes.

unresolved details begin to emerge. Gears start turning in the old noggin.

It becomes extremely exhausting trying to figure out what you have not decided yet. But then a single, simple, acceptable answer comes up and resolves all the unknown variables that have been driving you crazy.

I’m the problem. It’s me.

This is when we cue the self hate. So one way this can install barriers between us and liking or even being able to stand to acknowledge ourselves is when we’ve estimated that we were too big in the past.

And that caused our misfortune somehow, which we will then never forgive us for. Aka, was there a time when you did like yourself, which empowered you to take a risk.

And in the aftermath of that risk, your brain turned against the version of you that had a self esteem in order to make that decision. And you later went on to damn that iteration of you.

Now, you can’t love yourself in the present because the present you contains the past you, who audaciously had positive feelings for you, whom you blame for every ill fate that you estimate that they created. Or you might not be able to like the present you because you can’t even look into your past to see yourself existing because the past contains that jackass version of self who you are estimating fucked everything right up by daring to believe that they could do something new or only meant for other people or otherwise risky.

So the question is, is there some chance that your brain learned a long time ago that it wasn’t allowed to feel good about itself? You.

But something inspired you to have esteem anyways, somewhere along the line, which influenced you to make what you now assess was too big of a move. Life didn’t turn into a daydream.

Your brain turned against itself and decided that the not ideal outcome was obviously created by your positive self-regard and your head decided, never fucking again. Will we make that mistake?

Really making a superstition against self-love that might appear very real because it may have sealed in the inaccurate and abusive lesson delivered to you earlier in life, that it’s not allowable or it’s somehow unsafe for you to not hate you. Conversely, because trauma works in extreme opposites, is there some chance that your negative assessments of you in the past include concerns that there was a time you were not too big and wrongfully full of self-esteem, but actually you were too small or weak or helpless or victim-y.

You estimate that you no longer deserve love, care, or kindness because of it. In fact, you can’t even stand to think of yourself in that beaten down, hurting, suffering state, perhaps partially because it would hurt too much to realize you still carry some of those feelings at a low background level to this day.

And let us also consider the fact that some of us also may have misgivings about the false connection in our heads between self-compassion and what we’re wrongly assessing is self-victimhood. To acknowledge all our pain and struggle, to give ourselves some grace in return, we say, “Isn’t that making up excuses to let ourselves off the hook for weakness?

Aren’t we trying to ditch our self-responsibility? Aren’t we being pussy ass bitches?

” Self-critical brain havers, I feel you. It’s all part of the overarching fact that fear, for some of us, overlies and obfuscates sad.

As in, fear acts like a thick, obscuring, protective crust over ooey gooey sadness deep inside. Many of us have shame about having negative emotion, which creates fear around being sad.

And, many of us are afraid to recognize our sadness because, I mean, then what? Sadness is immobilizing and we’ve got shit to do.

We cannot float endlessly in our bottomless oceans of sad. So therefore, we can’t let ourselves acknowledge or honor those feelings, those times.

So, perhaps you block out all memory of instances of sadness or weakness because you don’t want to re-feel them. No one wants to memory trip themselves into a bottomless pit of despair or humiliation, leaving you, well, blocking out half of your existing.

So, you’re lacking a personal history, which creates a whole new self-love problem. It’s pretty difficult to do that whole autobiographical self-recall that we’re already very challenged by thanks to traumatic splitting.

Meaning the whole sad, shame, fear, avoidance, clusterfuck, where you do not want to look into your past, makes it really difficult to be able to see yourself in the present without a historic you to connect with or a present you to fully acknowledge. I mean, where are you going to send that loathe that you’re trying to feel for yourself?

Right? By getting rid of unwanted memories of self for whatever judgment you hold against you, you also get rid of your sense of self and therefore lose the target or inspiration or vessel for the feelings or actions of love.

We learn to do everything we can to ignore our own painful experiences because we’ve been told that they’re wrong in so many ways and we want to avoid feeling more pain. But then we lose the capacity to issue self-acceptance, compassion, care, or kindness to us because we end up negating and erasing our own existences in our minds alongside all the disembodied judgments that we’ve accepted and expanded upon.

So that we’re little more than these very theoretical enemies or fairy tale monsters, elusive boogeymen to our selves. Leaving us ironically, alone, isolated and adrift in the very endless sea of secret sad that we’ve been trying to avoid all along.

And we can’t even be with our self in that state because we can’t recognize our self to connect with that fucker, to issue self-acceptance, to find self-compassion, to offer self-love, to enable self-care, to promote self-supported post-traumatic growth. The solution of course to all of this is a combination of inner and outer work that allows us to be with our memories and difficult beliefs around old relationships that have been lost, around accepted criteria for love that we may hold against ourselves, around our ability to have esteem, around the decency and universal humanity of being sad.

To be with us, to practice feeling and enacting love while we correct our fucked up core beliefs around all our accepted obstacles to self-love, while we finally step back into our own lives and provide support to our self in past and present versions. While we finally get the balls to accept and feel our sad, to breathe with it, to be with our self and our feelings after possibly a very long time.

Wondering where that bitch went, if we really exist at all, and what possibly makes us even slightly worthy of self-love, eh? Anyways.

I think you’ll find even when politics are still burning our planet to the ground, corporate overlords are still taking all our fucking money, and really nothing has changed. The world is a lot more kind as soon as you’re back on your own timeline, reconnected with your self past and present, and you can get back to supporting yourself through personal growth and real, material life change.

Maybe not with full-fledged self-love yet, but at least with less disgust about the very idea of anything less than self-hate. That’s actually a really big, crucial, necessary, required step in compassionate trauma recovery, which as we keep emphasizing, is the only type of actual trauma recovery that actually exists or lasts for the actual long-term.

And with that, this has been What Would It Actually Take to Love Yourself? A shockingly painful series on self-love, because we’ve been discussing learned obstacles, and they suck.

Next time, though, we’re going to get to the less stabby part of the process. We will thaw our cold, dead hearts and actually start to stoke that elusive experience and set of behaviors that so many of us have forgotten or prohibited for our own protection.

We give ourselves permission and the mission to start to behave in ways that stoke self-love, even for a day or three, while we work on reparenting ourselves through the terrifying process of feeling us, feeling for us, and reparenting around the idea of love. I’ll see you there, or sooner, if you’re interested in this long step-by-step process we’ve begun in all its glorious details, or if you think this motherfucker deserves a couple of bucks for the efforts here.

Patreon. com/traumatizedmotherfuckers.

It’s five bucks on any platform other than iOS, and as a human gearing up for another winter in an RV while preparing a college course and laughing at the utter nonsense of this modern world and economy, your support does really mean the absolute world to me and the center of my world. Marcus Barks.

There he is. And until we speak again, fucker, hail your self.

Hail your sad. To hell with your superstitions around self-love that were probably born from abuse.

And cheers, y’all. Take care out there, and I’ll talk to you real soon.

Bye.