episode 214
“What's the difference between PTSD vs CPTSD?”
On Ask Kati Anything, your mental health podcast episode 214, Kati discusses single traumatic events vs. ongoing traumas, why therapists schedule follow-up appointments, stopping overthinking, self-harm due to lack of validation, setting boundaries, and struggles with enforcing them.
This is a transcript of Ask Kati Anything podcast episode your mental health podcast #214 Please note that the transcript is computer generated, and may have errors.
Ask Kati Anything episode #214
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Ask Kati Anything. I'm your host. Licensed marriage and family therapist, Kati Morton. I'm so glad that you're here. In today's episode, I'm going to discuss the difference between trauma from a single event versus multiple events, essentially PTSD versus complex PTSD. What's the difference? How do we treat them? I'm also going to explain why a therapist might ask if you want to schedule your next appointment each and every time that they see you, and how to stop ruminating. There was a big question about rumination, and how do we get ourselves out of it? Why? Self-harm can often be linked to a lack of validation. And finally, I'm going to discuss boundaries, why they can be hard to set and uphold, and also why they can feel bad sometimes. Without further ado, let's jump right in. Oh, actually, without further ado, if you're looking to connect with our community in more ways, I want you to know that we do have YouTube memberships as well as Patreon available. Both of those options allow you to engage with the community on Patreon. We have a discord server where you can chat with other people. in YouTube we have the community tab where I post and people communicate back and forth just like you do in the questions here. You can also ask your questions to get them answered up in Patreon and in the YouTube memberships. There's a ton of ways to get involved if you're looking for more support, and also if you want to purchase any workshops, I have them available at Kati morton.com. If you're looking to kickstart your mental health journey. Okay, now let's get into those questions.
Now, question number one says Kati, Hey Kati, how does trauma due to a single event, for example, a car accident or a rape, differ from trauma from an extended period of time and multiple associated incidences? For example, a soldier in heavy combat during a deployment or being in an abusive relationship for years. How does symptoms and the overall impact differ? How does the approach that a therapist takes to treat these two different scenarios differ? Is one easier to recover from than the other? Thanks. And someone also added a comment and said yes. And why does a fatal car accident in the present bring up old traumas from years past? Okay, first of all, I want you to understand the difference between PTSD and complex PTSD. And for those of you who don't know, post-traumatic stress disorder is we don't have a new diagnosis in the DSM for complex PTSD, but it is very different. But post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, happens when we are traumatized. Meaning what happens to us in our life is more than we can manage in the moment. It means that we fear for our life or safety, or the life and safety of someone else. And we can be traumatized and not develop PTSD, meaning that I can be in a traumatized situation. I can have something happen to me that is so overwhelming, so terrifying that I'm traumatized. Yet I have a level of resilience and support in my life that I'm able to manage it, overcome it, and move forward. But some of us aren't able to, right? We don't always have all the tools and skills, especially if we were young. And so we can develop PTSD now. I just want to say that so we're all understanding the difference, though, between PTSD and complex PTSD is really the extra layers in complex PTSD, meaning PTSD itself. You know, we we avoid things that remind us of the past trauma. You know, we feel threatened a lot. We can be hypervigilant and we can have flashbacks and things like that. Now, complex PTSD has all of that. But there's also this added component of like a negative self-concept, thinking something's wrong with us, we must be broken. The shame can be much stronger when we have repeated traumas. We can also really struggle to regulate our emotions. We can feel dysregulated quickly. we can fly off the handle really fast with people that we love, and we can really, really struggle in our relationships. I would argue that there might even be more overlap between complex PTSD and borderline personality disorder than there is between complex PTSD and PTSD. Now, that's just a I'd have to, you know, run my numbers, do my research. But that's just off the top of my head. I really feel like there's a lot of overlap because of those additional components. You know, things like chronic and extensive stress, emotion regulation, interpersonal difficulties, like, all of those things come out are also in borderline personality disorder as well. Okay. With all that being said, now, does trauma due to a single event differ? The trauma itself doesn't. I mean, it just depends on what's happening to us. But the way that we interpret it does. And that means that when we have repeated traumas, we start to think that it's something that we've done, we can struggle with, like our own beliefs about ourselves. We can struggle in our relationships more. And so, yes, the the symptoms differ a little bit and the overall impact will differ because especially for complex PTSD, when something goes on for a long period in our life, let's say we're traumatized for years. That means that we can struggle with memory of that time. That means we can have a, you know, there's a ton of different situations and feelings and experiences that we can have flashbacks about, or trauma memories in our body, nightmares, night terrors, things like that. and the approach the therapist would use would be similar in many aspects. But again, there's going to be this component that I would argue would be dialectical behavior therapy or some kind of emotion regulation techniques. And for most of my patients who have complex PTSD, there's always been a kind of a chunk of time that we dedicate to discovery of self, because if we've been repeatedly traumatized in childhood, specifically, we often didn't get the opportunity to figure out who we are and what we like and don't like and what we were interested in, maybe and not. And so we need to spend some time figuring that out. And so there's that component as well. But when it comes to the trauma treatment itself, it's going to be very similar. Meaning we will talk through what happened to us in as much detail as possible. We might try eMDR. There can be some somatic release that we get. Maybe we do some somatic experiencing or, you know, like the eMDR, the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing could be an opportunity for us to, you know, move through that. But the most effective treatment for trauma, regardless of whether it's complex or, you know, regular PTSD is going to be exposure therapy. I know it's uncomfortable. Nobody said that this is going to be easy, but we find and that's kind of why the processing like talking it through, going back to that place, talking in detail about what what happened to us, even though feels terrible and we're not going to want to do it. That's how we get out of it. That's how we make our world get bigger instead of smaller. We expose ourselves to things that we think we need to avoid because they remind us of the trauma and we prove to our brain that it's not actually as terrifying or upsetting as we thought it was going to be. That it's okay, that yes, that was harmful in that one experience or those multiple experiences. However, it's not harmful anymore. And so a lot of the treatments are going to be the same. But I hope that kind of helps you differentiate between them. And is it easier to recover from one than the other? No, I think it just depends on the person. It depends on your resources, and your own resilience and how how ready and able we are to engage in the treatment because, I mean, everybody's experience is going to be different. I don't want you to think that if yours is taking longer and you have PTSD, not complex PTSD, that you're judging yourself because everybody's experience is different. Now, the final question on here, when the person asked, why does a fatal car accident in the present bring up old traumas from years past? It's because our brain, for whatever reason, and I'm going to do kind of probably a shoddy job of explaining this, but our brain likes to clump things that are similar together. And so even though it's maybe processed through or we've, we've kind of dealt with it a little bit, it puts trauma in a certain part of our brain. That's why I love the film Inside Out. I know that's memory based, but you know all of that. All those things are filed, all the memories are filed in the back. It's similar. And try to think of that when I talk about this, that like we've had a trauma. So if that marble if you haven't seen Inside Out, all the memories are formed into marbles and rolled away and long term memory. Now, if we have that memory, that trauma memory, okay, it rolls into our long term memory. And then we have another trauma happen. Then our brain is like, oh, I need to file it with that one. It's it feels very similar to that one. It's going to trigger that old memory, that old experience, because they're connected emotionally. Our emotional memory is fascinating. It's like the same reason that when my grandma passed away recently, it made me feel even more intense grief for the fact that I lost my papa and my dad and my aunt and uncle. You know, in the past year. I mean, my dad had passed away like 15 years ago, but all of that was kind of turned back up in me because they're similar, because they share a lot of feelings, a lot of, you know, bodily sensations. And so when you have a newer trauma happen, it is incredibly common for that to trigger the memories or even pull out a repressed memory from our past of a trauma we experience. and I believe it's because of that emotional memory, that body memory being very similar, and the fact that our brain connects them because they are similar and but we are reminded, okay, I'm obviously, like I said there, if I was a neuroscientist, I could really get into the nitty gritty. But that's that's what I understand from what I've read. And people I've interviewed. And I hope that that helps.
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Let's move on to question number two. This question says Kati, at the end of every session, does my therapist ask me if I want to go ahead and schedule the next appointment or reach out for one later? I know I'm reading too much into this, but the thought of her thinking that I don't really need therapy popped into my head. Of course it did. There are many things that I want to work through, but I'm slow to really open up and get into deep things. Is this just standard practice? Thank you for creating this space for us to feel heard. I love this question. Now, I personally I used to do this okay, short story time when I was first starting out as a therapist. I mean, I'd finished my hours and I had gotten my license, but I was working in my private practice in Santa Monica, and I used to do this. And, a colleague of mine, Doctor Serrano, who I love, would just work just down the street. He, I was telling him because he we would talk about I don't even know, just being a mental health, you know, professional because he's a psychiatrist. Anyway, I was telling him, you know, I like to leave it open for people so that if they don't want to schedule, I don't want them to feel like I'm assuming I don't want them to feel pressure if they can't, you know, can't make it. Schedules get complicated. I give them an opportunity to schedule every session. And he was like, why would you do? He pointed out this concern. He said, Kati, don't do that to your patients. They're going to think that maybe they don't need to come again or that you're like, thinking that they're better than they are or that their their treatment's not important. He's like consistency is very healing. And I'd encourage you to just say see you same time next week and see how that feels for your patients. And I believed he was right. Okay. That's a it's a judgment call on my part. I decided not to do that anymore because I didn't like the thought that it could stir this up in people. but you can see it from both sides. So many therapists will do this because of the things that I mentioned. I don't want you to feel like I'm assuming that you can come next week. At the same time, it is an appointment. So I want to make sure that you want to keep it. It also cost money. Oh, I make sure you can afford it. And I want it to be a choice that you make to take care of yourself. Right? I don't want to have to make that choice for you. It's really not my place. And so I believe your therapist is like I was at the beginning where she's like, oh, I don't I don't want you to feel like you have to. And like it also maybe needed to change the date or time around. Right now. I wouldn't read anything into it because as therapists were held to a higher standard in communication. And if there's something happening in your therapy where we're like, you know what, I think you're doing great. You don't need to come back. We have to bring that up to you. Like I just mentioned to my therapist last week, I was like, you know, I thought about stopping therapy for a little while and seeing how I do. And she was like, okay, we'll talk about that next time. Like we have to communicate about it. And as therapists, it's important for us to do that. And your therapist hasn't. So there's no reason to believe there's anything going on. That's the great thing about therapy is that therapists will communicate when something's happening or we're supposed to. I shouldn't hold I mean, we're still human. People make mistakes, but I hold myself to a higher standard that way, where I will tell a patient, you know, even if it was, if there's a difficult conversation, like, I've had patients lash out and I'm like, the next session, I say, that was inappropriate. I can't have you talking to me that way. That makes me feel very unsafe or uncomfortable. We're going to have a conversation about it, because the whole point of therapy is having a safe space to practice healthy communication, healthy relationships. And so your therapist will tell you if something's going on. If you're concerned, though, and this is really getting in your head, you should bring it up again, because therapy is a great place to practice that healthy communication. And there's nothing wrong with just saying, hey, I every time you ask, I always think, oh, you know, am I like, maybe I'm doing better than I think or maybe I don't need therapy. Let them know that it's stirred this up in you because they might be like me and not have thought about it that way, but I wouldn't. I personally wouldn't read into it at all. I think it's just the way that they manage their practice.
Okay, let's move on to question number three. And this question says please talk about ruminating. It's brutal, but it's helped me remember and process narcissistic abuse and bolstered me in my, NC decision. No contact decision. But I need to move on to thank you, Kati. Of course. Happy to talk about it. Now, the important thing about ruminating is to understand what the word means and why we do it. Okay, so ruminating itself is when we essentially think about something over and over and over and over, we cannot stop like quote unquote processing something, meaning we're actually not processing something. It's, I believe, ruminating almost always anxiety driven. But we will think about something over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And it's like, we cannot stop, okay? That's what rumination is. It's not just thinking something through that would be thinking something through ruminating is when we just do not stop. And I believe it's anxiety driven. And the reason that we do it is partially because of the fact that our nervous system is wired to seek out threat and our environment and threat. We often think of only as physical but emotional threats are big also, and so any physical or emotional threat we're looking out, assessing all the time when we find something that could be a threat to us or that we perceive to be a threat, we can focus on it so that we hopefully can understand it on a deep level and make it so that it's no longer threatening to us. But as we all know, a lot of things in our life we don't have control over, right? I can't control how people talk to me. I can't control how quickly people get back to me or what's going on in other parts of the world and decisions other people make, right? We can't control any of that, but we can still focus on it. Our brain will want to because it feels like a potential threat. So we hyperfocus. We think about it in all these different ways and this way, in that way, maybe that maybe if I did this, then that, and that feeds into the rumination, I believe. And there are probably other facets and other kind of things that are pushing this forward and making this continue. But anxiety as well as, you know, our stress response and us being wired to consider threaten our environment. So what do we do about it now when it comes to rumination? Because I believe it's anxiety driven, we can hit our anxiety first, meaning we could look into medication to help us better manage it. We can find ways to thought stop. for those of you who don't know, we used to think in research that thought stopping could be would be effective for us in our head. You know, close our eyes and say stop, stop, stop, stop, stop that. That would stop that thought cycle. Turns out no. Also, it doesn't help for us to, you know, try to ignore it and distract. This is one of the places where distraction does not make it better. If we have rumination, if we have racing thoughts the best, if we have intrusive thoughts, the best way to stop them is actually to acknowledge them to. When that thought comes up to say, I see you, okay, I see you thought about, I don't know, embarrassing moment from from my teenage years. And you're just a thought. I don't have to engage with you. And we let it move on. You can imagine it on a cloud floating by or on a leaf in the river, you know, as it floats by. We can think about it in any kind of way like that, but acknowledging it, calling it a thought and saying, you know what? I don't need to engage with it. We find that to be the most effective I know. Who knew? researchers knew we just were behind on our, reading about it and then publishing it. So it took us a while. But that's how we actually get out of rumination. And I believe that a combination of that, if the if our anxiety is really high, then maybe an anxiety medication could be, as you know, could be of help to you can reach out to a psychiatrist or a medical doctor in your area, ask them about that. But acknowledging that it's happening and choosing to not engage with it, I see it. It's a thought. I don't want to think about that anymore. And I think personally that if we acknowledge it and then distract that, that would be effective. I know they were saying like distraction is not the best. I think it's when we distract without even acknowledging it that it's not the best. And so if if you find it hard to just say, oh, that's a thought and then move on, which I understand, let's try distracting after the fact, but I want you to acknowledge it. I want you to call it out for what it is, and I want you to choose to not engage with it, to do something else. And that's where distractions can come in, like, oh, I'm going to play this video game, I'm going to go for a walk. I'm going to call a friend, I'm going to play with my dog or cat or whatever. You know, something like that could be helpful too.
Okay, okay, let's move on to question number four. This question says why is is it that self-harm across the board all seem to struggle with validation of their emotional pain and self-harm? It's as if we're in an unspoken competition to prove who has the worst pain. I see this in myself and in my OCD. Oh, and my OCD accentuates it. Yes. So there can be an element of compulsion to my self-harm. Many of my patients feel that way. The bar keeps moving higher as to what I have to do to myself to prove my emotional pain is severe and the degree of self-harm valid, even though my head knows I'm completely valid in both. How do I begin to address the root issues and bottomless need for validation? Thank you so much for speaking about self-harm, Katy. Of course, and somebody else added on, I'm going to say this because it's I'm going to answer this all together pretty much says, how might our attachment style influence the reasons for why we self-harm? I experienced it as a compulsion and as a means of validating emotional pain. Personally, I found that drawing or writing can sometimes help. That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing. a couple of pieces here. First of all, I think most of my self-injury patients have some trauma in their past, and I know for a lot of us, trauma can feel like a heavy word. And I can't tell you the amount of pushback I've received from patients and community members over the years. They're like, I don't want to think it was a trauma, emotional neglect from our parents. It's abuse. Abuse is often traumatic. I'm not trying to jump to conclusions or make something out to be something. It's not. I'm just being honest about what you went through, an emotional neglect or neglect of any kind leads us to believe that we are too much, that our needs not big enough, that we are not as important as other people. That us asking for basic human things is not acceptable and means that something's wrong with us. And so when we grow up in that kind of experience and this can happen not just with neglect happens with physical abuse, sexual abuse, right? Our needs aren't tended to. And often when we speak up and ask for something, we are shouted down, we're ignored or we're harmed more so. The way that we express our upset in our pain is through. I mean, I've had patients with eating disorders who abuse drugs and alcohol and also self-injury or any, any mix, one or many of those things. And so in your case, when you're talking about self-injury and why is it so linked to validation, it's because we never got that. And when we were a child and we were harmed or we let's say we even fell down. So I had many patients over the years who said that when they would, like, fall down and skin their knee, instead of a parent helping them clean it up and put a Band-Aid on it. They were like, boys don't cry or girls don't cry. You know, brush it off, get up, or what are you whining about a little scratch like we're minimize were invalidated. Were told that it were too much, and we're left to take care of it ourselves. And I've heard some heartbreaking stories from my patients over the years of being too little to have to do this. trying to bandage up their wounds or the wounds of their siblings because parents weren't there, because they didn't tend to them, they didn't care to do what they really needed to do. And so we grow up thinking that no one else is going to help us, that what we that the validation we seek is too much. And so we try to express it this way. And that's why it feels like more and more and more, we keep doing more and more and more because to be honest, it never feels like enough. Now, what do we do to get out of this inner child work? And that's why I brought up that attachment style, that how that influences it. Because if we have any attachment issues, that means that our parents didn't show up for us in the way that we needed. They weren't either loving and consistent or they weren't. They didn't, acknowledge the things that we needed and offer those to us. They were neglectful in some way. And when we don't get what we need from our parents, especially in the first like five years of our life, we can develop attachment issues thinking that, you know, it's not safe. We can't count on anybody else. We can have a lot of toxic independence. I do everything myself. I can't count on anybody to show up. For me, that can be because our parents didn't show up for us, or we can find ourselves really anxiously attached. And that could be because we didn't get the emotional support that we needed from one or both parents. And so we glom on to people. We become super attached to people quickly. This can happen in romantic relationships and friendships. As we grow up, we try to fill that void that was left by the parent that wasn't there with somebody else. And this can happen in therapy, too. We can try to put our therapist in that void. And that's really where I mean, I have an attachment, an inner child workshop on my website at Katimorton.com. But I really would encourage you to tell your therapist, hey, I think I need to do some inner child work. I need to figure out where this is coming from. It could help for you to have photos or videos of you at a younger age to reflect on, because we often forget how little we were, what resources we had available. We look back with adult eyes on child us and we're like, it wasn't that bad, but child us is like, that was really bad and we forget. And so I really encourage you to start on that path, start remembering what it was like to be little. You, what you really needed. That's why impulse logs can be beautiful. I have them in my it's in my book traumatized. Also you can go to self-injury dot I think it's org forward slash impulse log and find it there. But impulse logs are great. It helps us try to figure out the the impulse would be to self injure and then the impulse log is going to ask us like what time and day did this happen. So we know if it's always if we see patterns, is it always happening on Fridays or always at night? Right? Then what is it that we're feeling? What emotions are we trying to express through our self-injury, and what could we offer to ourselves instead? And that's kind of that inner child where like, what is it that our inner child needs when we do this work with ourselves? It's like we have to take a minute to consider what we didn't get back then, and can adult us offer it to us now? Like, can we show up for ourselves consistently? Can we get a support through therapy? Because what we really needed as a kid was a therapist or some support or consistency, right. And so those are all kind of pieces of it. And I know I'm talking it through quickly, but that's why I have a whole workshop on it. You can talk to your therapist and get some support there. There's also amazing books to get you started. If you go to my Amazon shop, it's Amazon.com forward slash shop, forward slash Kati Morton. My inner child books are there. You'll see them. There's a lot of children's books. That's why sometimes those children's books can be incredibly healing. And there's also a couple books specific to working as an adult on our inner child. so you can find them there. Okay. So that's really why I hope that helps kind of explain it. yeah. Let me know if your follow ups.
Let's move on to question number five. This question is Hickory. I was wondering why you don't see patients anymore. I know you're busy, but you have such great advice. Oh, and then there's another question. Thank you. I don't see patients, for many reasons. Number one is that I used to pre-COVID, I started whittling down my, private practice around, I want to say 2018, if my memory serves me. Time's an illusion now. But I started paring it down. I used to be in the office. I was in my office three days a week, then two days a week, then one day a week. And it because I traveled a lot. If you guys don't know, one of my favorite things to do is speak. And I also go to different conferences. I also teach, I lecture, I often use, and that's one of my favorite things to do. And obviously Covid kind of put a halt on that. But I had already let go of my practice at that point. because I think I stopped seeing patients in like mid to late 2019. So because of all the travel and because I see a lot of BPD patients and eating disorder patients, I didn't really feel like it was ethical for me to keep seeing people because I couldn't be consistent in a way that I think is important in therapy. And so the patients that I saw up until my last few patients were just higher functioning, so I could go a couple of weeks without seeing them and everything was okay. But even then it started to feel a little bit again, just unethical. Like I wasn't able to put in the research time that I usually do with my patients. That started to not feel like it was a good choice and I wanted they deserved better. And so that's really why I don't see patients anymore. and then also I find being online sometimes, although I haven't experienced this yet, but it was a concern of mine and something I talk with one of my supervisors about back in the day is that being online, people can think, oh, she has all the answers and she can fix me. And that's not how therapy works. It's like you have to fix you. I can ask questions and I can try to move in the right direction, but I always wanted to be hyper aware of the fact that I don't want people to think I'm like an oracle, or that because I'm online, I know more than other therapists. There are wonderful therapists out there, and so anyway, not that that's not why I stopped, but really the reason I stopped is just time and travel. So that kind of made it difficult. Doesn't mean I won't in the future. I always I keep my license active and I also have my license now in Texas, but I just haven't. Yeah, haven't brought up a I haven't opened up a office. The other question says. Also, I've been wondering why boundaries are hard for me. Let's get into this. I broke my boundaries with my therapist, and it seems to be hard not to do it again. Boundaries with your therapist. I'd like to know what that was. I think I have an anxious attachment to her and I don't know how to stop thinking of her. My mom is going out of town. or the country, and I'm anxious about not seeing her for eight days. I really hope you can shine light on why I have anxious attachment to my therapist, and why it's so hard to keep boundaries with her and everyone in my family in life. You are a great help and I love what you do. Oh of course, glad to. quite a few things going on here. First of all, the anxious attachment, like I was just kind of talking about is often an indicator that we did not get the emotional support that we needed from one or both parents. this could also be part of our anxiety disorder. Just depends on what's going on with us. Everybody's different, right? I don't want to jump to any conclusions and assume that it's only childhood stuff, and that there's not also a piece of anxiety. Now. But anxious attachment often comes out of being emotionally neglected. having an inconsistent parent, having a parent who was there. It looks good on paper, but they didn't. They weren't able to meet us where we're at emotionally, right? Like, oh, we went to a good school and they, we, they always fed us and we had clothes on our back and we did our homework and they took us to school and blah, blah, blah, but we didn't feel supported. You know, when we cried, we were ignored. You know, I don't know what happened, but those are just some of the ideas of the reasons this could happen to you. And you need to let your therapist know that this is going on, that you have an anxious attachment if they don't already know, because I really would encourage you to do some inner child work or potentially attachment based work, which there's some overlap there. Again, I have those two workshops available on my website, but it's also something you can do with your therapist. I would let them know because I, I think that the anxious attachment is what is making those boundaries difficult, like one is leading to the other. I also have a boundaries workshop on my website, so if you want to go around the world, you totally can. I would encourage you probably to start with Inner Child, then go to attachment and then go to boundaries, because we're kind of like laying the foundation so that we can move forward. But when we are anxiously attached, boundaries feel, they can feel devastating to us. They can feel very dangerous. They can feel like they're cutting us off from the one thing that we need, which is more support and care. And so that, I believe, is what is feeding into this. And so if we can focus on that attachment, I believe the boundary stuff will fall in line later. and because if we can not feel if we can find a way to soothe that anxious attachment, experience the feeling of like, push, pull, I need people close. Oh my God, I can't let go of them. I need you around that kind of codependency, that feeling that we really can't make decisions in our life without other people. If we can assuage that, if we can find a way to connect, to offer things to ourselves that we didn't get when we were younger, then boundaries won't feel so wounding to us and then, I believe, will actually be able to place and uphold boundaries that are healthy. Because I'm actually wondering if your boundaries are healthy. When we're struggling with anxious attachment, it can be really difficult for us to know where to place them and how to place them and how do we communicate about them. And so let's start with that. anxious attachment piece. And then we can move into the boundaries. Okay, okay. Hang in there and we're gonna talk about boundaries because here is our final question.
Question number six. It says why does upholding my boundaries feel so defeating to give insight, I'm in a toxic relationship where my partner is regularly passive aggressive and my boundary is I could not tolerate this behavior. I get really panicky and actually don't hear what you're saying. So whenever you do X, I will leave the conversation and go to my room. I'm saving up to eventually leave because he doesn't see a fault in his behavior and is getting really. Oh, and it's getting really exhausting, I can imagine. Anyways, whenever I actually do leave, I feel like I failed so badly. Interesting. I know that boundaries are set to protect myself and to make the relationship healthier, because there's no point to continue the conversation when I'm in panic mode and he gets more and more aggravated by my quote unquote not listening. It's not that I think I'm bad for have. It's not that I think I'm bad for having boundaries. I actually quite like having them. It's just that I feel defeated, not protected as I should. Why is that? This is a great question. And my automatic like thought belief when I read this question was I think it's because they're not the right boundaries. Something about your boundary is not what you want. And I mean that in that like you leave in the corner, I think it's great what you're doing. I don't see any fault with your boundary, by the way. I don't want you to think that me saying it's incorrect means it's wrong. I mean, it's not right for you. It's not giving you that. like you said, you don't feel protected as you should. And I'm curious if this is a current story or if it's an old story, meaning this protection that you're seeking. Do we think that's coming from like, a past experience, maybe childhood, maybe another relationship? Or do we think it's actually current? And I'm just asking that because if it's not current, then that's why it's happening. And it has nothing to do with the boundary. Everything's fine. This is just an old story that we're going to have to process through. But if you're like, no, I think this is current. I think I don't feel as protected as I should because and I'd want you to be a little curious about that. Does it mean that you leaving that conversation or walking away still leaves you upset? And we haven't we don't have coping skills at the ready to help us kind of decompress. Is it because we're stuck in this relationship? Because I also want to recognize the fact that, like, you have these boundaries in place and you want to leave, but you can't, and that kind of feeling of like hopelessness or a little bit of helplessness can feel icky and leave us feeling unprotected regardless of the boundary. And so we really have a little deep diving to do. But let's talk more broadly about boundaries. Now. What you're doing is great. This is exactly what I would recommend that you do, that if someone's being passive aggressive, if they're, you know, starting to get escalated in the way that they talk to you. And it's just exhausting and that the dynamic, it sounds like the dynamic in the communication between you two is just not healthy. So you're like, I don't need to keep having these conversations. I'm going to remove myself. Time out. I'm going to remove myself. you know, I, I don't hear what you're saying. I'm too panicked. I'm too overwhelmed. I have to remove. That's great. Now, I don't know if you return to the conversation later. Just throwing that out there, because I just popped into my head because that might be part of it, is like it never gets resolved. It might feel like it escalates and escalates because I don't know. but anyways, back to boundaries. I know that boundaries are something that we put in place to protect us, and the person we're in the relationship with boundaries are not requests like this person did a great job. Boundaries aren't like, hey, can you stop doing this to me, that means that we're putting all the power into for them. Like, you need to stop this. And if they don't, what right. And that's where the boundary is, is if they don't stop doing this, what are you going to do? Because you can only control yourself. Sure. We can put in a request. Hey, please stop talking me that way. Then the boundary is that if you keep doing it, then I'm going to leave the conversation like this person did. So just. Just as a reminder, boundaries are not requests. They're things that we're going to do. So, when we place boundaries and they can feel kind of defeating or they can feel uncomfortable or icky, it often and not necessarily in this case, like I said, you're going to do a little deeper dive into where this is coming from. But for many of us, it can feel like we're going to hurt the other person or can even feel like it wounds us. And I always believe that that comes out of potentially a past trauma. Because if if you guys don't know that one of the forms of our stress response, otherwise known as fight or flight, is form and fighting is when we extremely people please in the hopes that someone won't hurt us again. So if we're going to place up a boundary, I'm not going to do this. If you keep doing that, that means that we can't do that. Extreme people please him so that they don't hurt us again, and so we can feel like we're putting ourselves in a threatening position. So that makes sense, because the finding is what we felt like protected us. And we don't do that because boundaries are not about people pleasing. They're about, you know, safety and consideration. It can feel very threatening. So there's that piece. I also think that sometimes boundaries can feel really difficult when they were never shown in our family. If we had a really enmeshed family or if we had addiction in our home, we can often be really codependent, so can feel like other people's emotions are our emotions and we can't make decisions on our own. We need to check in. We don't want to upset anybody. You know, it's like this whole in order to keep the system going. So when we put these in place, it can feel like we're hurting other people or we're hurting ourselves. And that's really, I believe, out of the fact that these are just different. It's not something we know how to set up. It's not something we know how to uphold. It feels very foreign. And so it takes us a little bit longer to get comfortable with them. And that's why it's important for us to like practice and practice and practice and know that it's okay if we overstep our boundaries or we don't uphold them that one time. That doesn't mean all is lost. It just means that we're learning and we're trying to get better. Okay, so back to this person's question. they said that they don't think that they're bad for having boundaries. They quite like having them. They just don't feel as protected. And so I guess I'd have you dig in, if that's coming from an old story or a current story. And what do you mean by protected? Do we still feel like even if we leave this situation, that we're still under threat and under threat? How and is it because we can't leave that home like we can't get out of there? Those are all things I'd encourage you to to journal about and think about and see what comes up for you. Because I think there's an answer in there. There was an add on it said, as someone who's trying to recover from the fall in response, like I just mentioned, the setting boundaries ever start to feel easier? Yes, I'll talk about that. There's a small reprieve from knowing that I'm no longer fully self abandoning, but I've been in a difficult spot on my healing journey, where both my falling response and upholding my boundaries makes me feel really dysregulated. Does it take time in practice? Yes, I know that's a shitty answer, but it's the truth that it does get better over time. Because essentially what we're having to prove to ourselves is that by placing this boundary, we're not putting ourselves in a threatening situation, and we have to prove it over and over and over again, because in our past, we formed right. I love there's actually a meme I saw online or me, it was a quote from a therapist, but it was beautiful and I should have saved it, but I didn't. But essentially what it said is extreme people pleasing or the fan response is really self abandonment, and that's what we should call it. And that is 100% true. And I want to say that again so you can hear it extreme people pleasing or the fun response is actually self abandonment. And that's what we should start calling it. And I couldn't agree more. And so I like it. This person reference that. So kudos to you for doing that. Setting up boundaries. It's going to feel threatening at first, and we're slowly proving to your brain that it's not and that you are safe and okay. And so as you may feel dysregulated, we can do some body shakes. We can dunk our face in cold water. We can take four big deep breaths. Whatever helps kind of calm your system down a little bit. We can do that and know that with time, with practice, with patience, it does get better. Okay. Thank you all so much for listening and watching. Please share this podcast. Please head over to Katimorton.com. If you're looking for any of those workshops or Patreon or YouTube memberships. If you're looking for more connection to our community, have a wonderful rest of your week. Do your homework and I'll see you next time.
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Here are the loose “chapters” in this episode.
0:11: 💡 Distinguishing between trauma from single events and multiple events, exploring symptoms, impact, and treatment differences.
5:29: 💡 Understanding the distinction between PTSD and complex PTSD, including treatment approaches and triggers.
10:15: 💭 Understanding rumination, therapist's scheduling approach, and communication in therapy sessions.
14:37: 💭 Understanding the impact of rumination on anxiety and the need for validation in self-harmers.
19:24: ⚙️ Impact of childhood neglect on self-harm behavior and the importance of inner child work.
24:06: ⚖️ Exploring boundaries in therapy, inner child work, and reasons for not seeing patients anymore.
28:25: 💡 Exploring the challenges of setting boundaries when dealing with anxious attachment in relationships.
32:54: 🛡️ Exploring the challenges of setting and maintaining boundaries for protection in relationships.
37:23: 🌱 Exploring the challenges of setting boundaries while recovering from extreme people pleasing behavior.
Recap for https://youtu.be/Ghq0J1CzK2U by Tammy AI
