#12 - Childhood Trauma - An Interview with Tim Fletcher

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the very first episode of my new series where I have some long-form conversations with some very, very interesting folks on the topics of trauma relationships and personal development. I am very pleased to have the world-famous Tim Fletcher on uh on board today. And uh and I I would like just to ask Tim, could you talk a little bit about you, uh what your background is and how you ended up being in the kind of the field of trauma work?

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Sure. I in 1986 became a pastor, and so basically in the pastoral field, and in 88 we moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, just above you. And uh after 10 years of pastoring, I burnt myself out, and that was really related to my own trauma, and really a lot of that was from kind of the religious teaching that I grew up with, which was love has no boundaries, you just give, give, give, give. So love was almost defined as codependency, you didn't say no to people. Um, and then kind of the Protestant work ethic of the the West, or that I grew up with that if you relax, you're being lazy, if you take care of yourself, you're being selfish, you just gotta work, work, work. And so I really was great at working. I had tons of energy as a young man, but then church started growing. I had three small children, all under under the age of five, and um just my responsibilities were growing, and I didn't have the tools to take care of myself. Uh, all I knew was dig deeper, dig deeper, and I burnt myself out. And so I then entered kind of seven just really difficult years of mental health, depression, anxiety, issues, uh, physical health issues, diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and it was it was a really difficult time. And in Canada, you get disability insurance for two years, and then after that it runs out, and so you my wife was doing part-time work to try to pay the bills, and so I had to find something. So I got some jobs on dairy farms, cattle farms, horse farms, which uh hindsight was actually very therapeutic for me. Physical labor, working with animals, being out in nature all day long. I just slowly started getting my health back and my mental health a bit. Um so I got stable again. And during all this, I'm trying my brain is wired that I'm trying to figure out what's going on, what what's causing it, and I still didn't quite un didn't understand it. I just knew it was it was a really difficult time. And there was some suicidal ideation as part of kind of those dark days. But um in 2003, a lady that had been at our church worked at a treatment center in Winnipeg, which was the only treatment center in Canada that saw addiction as a symptom of deeper issues. And at that point in time, trauma wasn't even talked about or a word. So they just saw that people in addiction were trying to medicate pain deep down inside, and that the pain probably started in childhood. So it was their way of fixing the problem, of escaping um the pain. She asked me to consider being a counselor. So I said I'll go for an interview, and and they offered me the job on the spot. And I so I said, okay, I'll try for three months. And within two days, as I was listening to people share vulnerably, openly about core painful things, I thought, this is what I've always been wired for. This is my home, this is where I belong. And I just fell in love with it.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

That's really cool. Uh, you know, and so much of what you were what you were talking about, I I can relate to, right? I I um uh I am also in recovery, and addiction hit me very hard and very young. I remember the first time that I that I drank, I was boy, it was probably 13 or 14 years old. And I had been walking through some woods, and I came across this dilapidated um 12-pack of Miller beer that had been sitting there so long that the tops of the cans had been bleached white by the sun. And um, and I remember just feeling this impulse to you know to open one up and drink it. And I mean, it was just the you can imagine, it was like the most foul stuff in the world. So I drank three of them. And and I remember I remember the experience as though it was yesterday. It was like somebody grabbed me from the ankles and shook me, and everything snapped into place. And there was this there was this peace and calm. There was this escape from this sense of agitation and this feeling like nothing worked, that this feeling like I was always isolated. And even when I was in a group of people, it's like everyone else seemed to have something going on that I wasn't a part of. And there was always, you know, this guessing at what normal was, and you know, all of these things that I struggled with. And in that moment, that all just melted away. And I never wanted to leave that point again. And had it not been for what I consider to be divine intervention when I was living in an abandoned house and at this point was down to 134 pounds. And I mean, I was in really, really tough shape, um, you know, I I wouldn't be here today. I would have pursued that to, you know, to my own demise. You know, in the 1980s, nobody was talking about trauma. And so I was labeled with everything from ADHD to bipolar to all kinds of stuff, right? And none of it ever fit. I mean, I would try the medications and all of that, and none of it seemed to really give me any reprieve from that just that emotional rawness. When I I saw your videos, and I think these must have been those those Friday night videos when you're doing these workshops, I was like, for the first time, I heard somebody articulate my experience in a way that I had never seen that articulated before. And what was interesting about that is prior to that point, I used to just I used to just say that I had broken brain syndrome, right? Just kind of as a joke, because I didn't know what to label what I was experiencing. And once I heard the language and I heard you describe the experience of what it's like to live with childhood trauma as an adult. It was almost as though like some glasses were put on me, and everything that was fuzzy before suddenly came into focus. And that really started my journey in really diving into understanding trauma. And today I see the effects of adverse childhood experiences showing up in people's lives and in the world all over the place.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Does that make sense? Very much how I would explain it to people is um when you look at trauma, there's a spectrum. There's very severe trauma, and that's what most of us kind of restrict our definition to. If it's not severe trauma, then it's not trauma. But there's also a very mild form of trauma. And so I've spent a lot of my career trying to put words to this little tea trauma and help people understand it. But one way to understand little tea trauma, it's not that something bad happened to you, it's that something good that should have happened to you didn't. Well, then nothing bad happened to you. It so it's invisible. It you like all my physical needs were met. I had a wonderful house, I was in sports, I had lots of toys and things, nobody ever hit me, but my emotional needs that should have been met weren't met. Uh how do you explain that's invisible, that's little T trauma. Another way to say that is when you think of anything in your childhood dynamics in the family that weren't healthy. So maybe mom always gave in to dad and took care of dad more, and dad was able to be a little bit narcissistic. So that's not exactly ideal or totally healthy, but that was your normal. It wasn't terrible, it wasn't highly abusive, but but that became your normal template. Then that's going to affect you later in life. That's going to affect your relationships and how you think and go about relationships in a negative way. And so what I want all clients to realize is art of healing recovery is you've got to deconstruct your upbringing, your family dynamics, your religious dynamics, and your cultural dynamics, not looking for terrible things necessarily, but looking for what was unhealthy. Because every little unhealthy indoctrination, pattern, dynamic will have affected you negatively and caused you to need to adapt, cause you to need to try to compensate for it. And it's going to replay itself in your adult relationships in a negative way. And so we're not just looking for big T trauma, we're looking for this very subtle, unhealthy stuff that all of us have, because there's no perfect families. There's functional families, there's somewhat healthy families, there's no perfect families. So we've all been affected to some degree by our families. So if you look at my story, in many ways, had a wonderful family, but there was that religious indoctrination that caused us to confuse love, that caused us to confuse hard work versus rest. That got stuff out of balance just enough to have the ripple effect in my life of a burnout, um, and not knowing what to do with mounting stress. So it's really uh to me, like what the Gabramate's latest book, The Myth of Normal, says that the research is showing that over 80% of the world has little T trauma. And I think he's trying to be polite, because it's probably over 90, close to 100%. We all have something that we need to deal with from our past that wasn't as healthy as it should be in our home, that's having a negative effect on us. And so it's not to say we're terrible, it's not to say, oh, you're screwed up. There's a stigma now to your life because you're traumatized. It's no, we just gotta be able to deconstruct our past and say, I want to get healthier. I don't want to just accept that that's normal and okay, because it's going to hurt my children and get passed on and become generational. And I really don't want that to happen.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

The word, one of the words that you brought up that I think is an important one for us to spend a little bit of time on, if that's okay, is kind of the normal and healthy and what that actually is. Because I I think there's some confusion out there. And it certainly was the case with me, and I and I see it in in clients too, when um, you know, somebody might be an addict and suffer from depression and have ADHD and all this other kind of stuff. And, you know, and I ask, you know, tell me a little bit about what it was like growing up. Oh, it was great. You know, everything was fine. You know, there was, I just hadn't, I had a normal family, you know, and my struggle with that, right, is I don't necessarily want to talk somebody into, you know, seeing themselves as a victim. And so I I'm very careful about not trying to um kind of impose on somebody the idea that they've been traumatized, but rather how to help people have an objective view of kind of what happened in a way that allows them to understand how some of the things that happened in the past may have affected them and are showing up in their life today.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

Yeah, it's a to me, it's a key question, and it's to me what I really focused on. Because what I saw early on, as soon as you brought in trauma and that you might have trauma, what I saw clients were actually hearing me say was you're saying my parents are bad. You say you're saying I had a terrible home. You're saying I have to sell out my parents, and I'm not willing to do that. So you're putting a stigma on me that we were a terrible, abusive, violent family. And it's no, I'm not, but that's what they were hearing. And so it was I had to develop a way that people could self-discover that their home, there were some unhealthy parts amidst some healthy parts. It was a mix of healthy and unhealthy. And so to me, it became developing the 12 needs. And the 12 needs is basically we're physical beings, so we have physical needs: food, water, protection, um, housing, and all of that. Then sex is a part of a physical drive that becomes a need. Then we have intellectual needs to learn to be guided because we have that little limbic brain as a child that just thinks short term and what makes me feel good. So we need a guide that can think long term and that can think in terms of what is loving, what is not loving. Then we have emotional needs. So we need to be able to be accepted for who we are, our unique personality. We need to connect with somebody. That attachment need is the key need for a baby because they can't meet any of their own needs. They need to attach to somebody who can take care of them. So we're driven to connect. And then we need to be able to be authentic, vulnerable. We can talk about everything. And so if you just take those, all of a sudden, if you go to into a family where you're expected to fit a certain box and conform to what dad wants you to be, wants you to be a lawyer or a doctor, but you want to be a cowboy and in the rodeo and or an artist or a musician. Well, no, you no, no, we're gonna force you to be. Well, you're not accepted, or you're a girl and you're not prim and proper and quiet and sweet, you're loud and out there and wanting to do boy stuff and sports. Well, no, no, no, we gotta force you to become fit the role of what this look. So you're not accepted for who you are, and then you try to connect, but dad's always too busy with work, mom's always preoccupied and a bit depressed, and and so you just can't connect. And then you try to talk about certain topics and be vulnerable, and you get we don't talk about that, or you get judged straight away. That's terrible, you shouldn't do that. So that's just three emotional needs that sadly in most homes today aren't met consistently. So all the physical needs are met, but the emotional needs aren't met. And so then that goes kind of into relational stuff, where you need love, you need respect, you need relationships where you're valued for who you are as an equal. Well, a lot of people like you, you go in and what what's the relationship? I gotta make you inferior to me, I gotta put you down, I gotta tease you, make fun of you. Um, and so it's very derogatory, it's very shame-based. And so all of a sudden you realize some key needs there aren't being met. And then you've got spiritual needs, and so it's a healthy home is a home that's consistently able to meet all of those 12 needs. An unhealthy home may not meet any of the needs, or it might meet some but not others, and so it's really understanding. So, what I find is when clients begin to realize oh, my physical needs were met wonderfully, but wow, I wasn't accepted. I couldn't be authentic. I never felt connected to anybody. I guess I didn't even feel love. I had to earn love. Love was conditional on me being what they wanted me to be. I had to conform. That's not love. All of a sudden they go, Whoa, that makes me feel bad. That makes me feel like I wasn't good enough the way I was. That and then that leads to a discussion about that shame core belief that something must be wrong with me. That's why I'm not being accepted, or nobody wants to connect with me. And and so they begin to understand that had ramifications and how I saw myself, how I felt about myself. And then because of that, when I went to make friends, I couldn't be authentic with them because they I was pretty sure they'd reject me like I got at home. So now I had to wear masks, now I had to adopt roles to fit in. I had to become what they wanted me to be. Oh, I couldn't trust people, I couldn't be authentic. I now had to be the one that do did all of the adjusting and changing. And I never felt totally relaxed or safe or connected. I always had to perform to get connection. And so they begin to gradually develop this awareness of the ramifications of those three emotional needs not being met into every part of their thinking, emotions, relationships, and how they coped. And that can be quite overwhelming, but to me it it becomes a safe way, because now I'm not trying to malign your parents, say they're the devil. I'm just saying, hey, they miss those needs. They did some other needs really well, and we're gonna celebrate that, but they miss those needs, and I don't want to beat them up, I want to just understand how that affected you so that I know what I can do to heal that and to get healthy in those areas and learn how to meet those needs, because those needs are still there, and I need to learn how to meet them in a healthy way, because for many people, what they did in childhood is try to learn to meet those needs in unhealthy ways. So now they felt they didn't belong. So, how do you belong? Well, smoke with the kids in the at the corner, or be really good in sports, or be cool, or how do you get accepted, be really pretty, or be really good in bed, and then everybody wants to be your friend or have lots of money and buy friends and all of those things. So they're still trying to get the needs met, but they're using tools that seem to work but actually don't satisfy because they still don't feel truly accepted for who they authentically are.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

The one of the things that you brought up that I think is a really interesting phenomenon, and I I've experienced this myself and with my clients, is that the minute that you start Kind of going into childhood events, there is this natural protecting my parents. You know, don't, don't, don't tell me that, you know, that that things were bad. Right. And and it's interesting because even um, you know, even though I know and I know I know, and I can, I can look back and s and you know, look at some things that happened to me from a very in informed place and just go, wow, that was really messed up. And I can totally understand how that how that hit me. There's still this natural impulse to try to like spackle over those and smooth over those and kind of normalize all of that. And so one of the challenges for me, and I think it's a challenge with a lot of people, is how can I look back and have any kind of objective perspective on what was healthy and unhealthy? And does it make more sense? This is one of the things that I've I've done, and you can tell me whether this makes sense or whether there's another way of doing this, is I look at, well, what are some of the struggles that I'm having now? And then kind of look back and and say, where might that have come from? Right? It's not that I'm trying to demonize, but it's like this experience that I'm having now, where where in my past may that have come from? What kinds of events may have happened to me that that could help me kind of make sense out of some of the things I'm experiencing today?

SPEAKER_01 23:43

Yeah, and that's really to me what I want science to begin to understand is we move forward in understanding by having compassion and curiosity. There's no value in judging ourselves and judge so we're not doing this in a condemning judgmental stigma. We're looking for a scapegoat to to blame for everything. We're really trying to be curious with a compassionate place. So if I see something in my life today that I begin to realize, I don't think that's healthy. That might be what has been my normal for years, but just because something's normal doesn't mean it's healthy. So why is it that that it always leads to upsetting my wife or getting my children so they're afraid of me or don't want to spend time with me? Okay, instead of going to it's their fault, or instead of going to I'm a loser, let's be compassionate and curious. Let's go, okay, what's going on here? And so that then means I need to go back and be able to look honestly at what happened in my childhood, the patterns, the things that caused me to begin to react that way. So I like to ask people, you know, do you have any memories of when that pattern first started in your life, when you first started coping that way or responding that way? Was it something that happened in the family? Was it an emotion that you felt? Um, and so often people can begin to get memories of, oh yeah, I remember the first time I did that, and here's what was happening, and that can give them a whole lot of insight. But there's a second piece here, Todd, that I think is so important. So when a person goes to go back, there is that resistance that it I don't want to speak against my family, dishonor them, make us look bad, make us look like it was terrible. I don't want to misrepresent it by going to the other extreme of it's all negative. And so it's no, we just want to see this accurately. Um, and so this is where to me you gotta help a person. This is not what you're saying, this is what's being said, and and really help them kind of make those necessary distinctions between all bad and not or all good. Um but so there's resistance that way, but there's this other area of resistance that's called shame. And so, what happened when a child was neglected or abused is they interpreted it that I'm the problem, I'm the reason I'm being neglected. So I must not be lovable or I'm not valuable, or I'm I'm I'm just not good enough. Something's wrong with me that's causing others to reject me. So they develop a core belief that I might have good parts of me, but I've got uh parts of me that make me unlovable, that make me rejected by others. And I don't like those parts of me. I need to hide those parts of me. If those parts ever get exposed, people will reject me, abandon me. And so I must wear masks, I must hide parts of me and only let them see the good parts of me. So that core belief, people basically are compensating for, they're hiding it, but kind of compensate. I gotta let them only see this part of me. But many people also deny that part. There's a level of denial. No, this is the what you see, that's me. That's the real me. There's nothing more to see here. Everything else is good. So they they're they're more focused on the external image I'm creating is the real me. What I'm hiding on the inside isn't even there. So only look at the external image. So they're hiding it from others, but they're starting to hide it from themselves. And that because there's a massive fear that if that ever leaks out, everybody will reject me. They'll see me for who I really am, they'll see that I'm a zero, and there will be a full-scale abandonment of me, and they'll lose all respect for me. Nobody will want to be my friend, nobody will want a relationship with me at all. So I must protect this at all costs, hide it even from myself. And so what happens when you start to go backwards and look at stuff is you're threatening to expose what I've been hiding for years. And the resistance is you're gonna see the real me, and you're gonna reject me, or you're gonna expose to the world what I'm really like, and you're gonna be part of the problem. And so many people retreat further into this hidden place and get more resistance to going there. Why do I need to go there? Just tell me what to do in the here and now. Give me tools to fix it. Who needs to go back to all that pain? What's in the past is in the past. You don't, you just move on. And it's like, whoa, the shame that's causing you to be afraid to look there is massive. And and so, what I want clients to realize is that shame belief that you have, do you realize it's based a hundred percent on lies that you thought were the truth? So, what you had as a child was so, in a healthy relationship, if I want connection, I have authenticity, but I have it with safe people. What you had was you had authenticity wanting connection, but with unsafe people. And so what you then concluded is authenticity leads to zero connection. And so now you're trying to do that again with safe people, and so I won't be authentic, but you better connect with me, but you're never gonna get connection, and so in your mind, you didn't know as a child the difference between safe and unsafe people, and so in your mind, all of your formulas, your math is built on working with unsafe people, which caused you to have the wrong conclusion. So authenticity equals no connection, true with unsafe people, but not with healthy people. And so we have to go back and be willing to realize I built my life on lies because I was with unsafe people. And now, if I'm with safe people, the whole formulas are entirely the opposite of what I believed growing up. And so I'm not getting you to go there to try to say your shame beliefs are the truth. I'm trying to get you to go there to get you to see that your shame beliefs are lies and getting you to actually believe the truth, because then we're gonna start down the path to freedom from all of this bondage to these lies.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

That that kind of brings me to uh to the part of the conversation where we we talk about like, well, now what? You know, how how do we move forward? Because there that was that was excellent. I mean, there were really three things that you talked about in there that I think were very relevant. One is being able to see things accurately. And and I think that part of my problem, and I I see this with clients all the time, right? And people that I work with, is that because of the experiences that I had in childhood, I oftentimes have a difficulty differentiating what is real and what is not. It's it's kind of like my perceptions are a little bit skewed. And so it is it's hard to see what is authentic, what is real. The other thing that you talked about was the importance of compassion, which I just could not agree with more. One of the first things that I say to all clients is we got to practice radical non-judgmentalism, right? I mean, just because you've been wounded and just because your your parents may not have been perfect doesn't mean that you're bad, sick, or wrong, or you suck as a human being, right? It's it's that, but because if we if we can't step out of the self-criticism or the judgment around things, it is we we find ourselves always kind of interpreting things and reacting out of out of emotion rather than being able to step outside of that just to be able to get an accurate picture of of what is. And the third part is you were talking about that fear of vulnerability, and you know, that what was coming to mind is you know, just stuffing something into a dungeon closet and closing the door, piling bricks on top of it, pouring concrete under, you know, on top of that, building a building on top of that with a big sign that says, do not enter, right? And um because that's what I did, right, for for so long, because there was this sense of if you really knew me, then you know, you would you wouldn't like me. And so what is like the first little step that people can make when they are when they recognize that there's something, they may not even know exact everything that that's going on, but they can recognize there's something. What are the first little steps that people can take to start on their journey for recovery?

SPEAKER_01 34:03

To go back to your first thing about seeing things accurately. So if if I was to be teaching a seminar on this, I'd want to kind of cover three things with clients about this as to why they skew things, why they don't see things accurately. So the first thing is that there's an element of complex trauma that is gaslighting. So mom and dad, kind of as the authorities in the room, and you come in and you say I'm in pain, oh, it's not that big a deal. So you get minimized, you get gaslit, or I don't feel safe with uncle. Oh, uncle's fine, go give uncle a hug. So they shut down your intuition and tell you you're crazy, or uncle touch me, oh, that didn't really happen. So you're being gas-lit all the time. So you're doubting your own thinking, your own perceptions. And so that causes you to easily be influenced by others down the road and doubt your own perception, doubt your own thinking, which leads to skewed thinking. The second piece to me that's so important here is we see things accurately when we're in our ventral vagal system, which means when we're in that safe place of connection and love where we can relax, then all of our emotions are on board, all of our brains on board, we're able to be fully human. But when we don't feel safe, we go to two other potential ventral or vagal states. And so the first is our sympathetic vagal system, and it that's fight or flight, and that's I gotta get out of here or I gotta defeat the enemy. And if that doesn't work, I go to the dorsal vagal state, which is freeze, shut down, retreat to an internal world where I feel safe. What's important is when a person goes out of their ventral state to either their sympathetic or dorsovagal, you feel very negative emotions. And what the brain then does is it develops a story to fit the emotions. So we call it emotional reasoning. So your reasoning is not based on facts now, your reasoning is based on what you're feeling because of your vagal states, which are in survival mode, not feeling safe. And so if a person's still in their sympathetic or dorsal, which many people are in recovery, they're still getting skewed messages because their brain is still creating stories to fit their emotions, that might not be part of the fact. So that's second one. Third one is if you grew up with kind of um chaos all the time. So you didn't know what to expect on any given day, the rules changed every day, the consequences changed every day, nobody was organized, everybody was flying around in a panic, there's parties wild, crazy. That was your normal. You got used to that. Now, if you come into adult life and you're with very healthy people that are organized, structured, good habits, and routines, you go, this feels wrong, this feels unsafe. So you're skewed because your normal is the lens you're looking through, and now healthy seems weird. It seems something's wrong. I feel in danger here. Now my nervous system is on edge because I'm in an environment that's not normal. So all of those things skew it. So hopefully why I did that lead in is because where a person starts, there's not a right place for every person. You just you gotta start somewhere. But what I want people to realize is because of all of that, trauma has affected how you think. It's affected your emotions, it's affected your ability to connect to safe people. You've stopped trusting, you've learned to perform, you've learned to adapt, you've learned to do all kinds of different coping things. Um, so you don't know how to manage your thinking accurately, you don't know how to manage your emotions well, you don't know how to connect and have meaningful relationships because you've got all the wrong templates, you've got all the wrong role models, etc. So, what I want people to realize, big picture, is you can't do recovery alone just in a little academic world. You gotta connect with other people and with yourself because part of what shame did is you felt abandoned by others. You didn't like yourself, so you abandoned yourself. So you gotta connect, but then you have to learn information, but that can't just stay in your brain. You now have to connect with your emotions, with your body, you gotta become human again because what you were doing to survive as a child was you shut down your gut, you shut down trusting other people, you shut down thinking, and you just thought like everybody else thought. So you got to learn to feel again, you got to learn to listen to your gut again, you gotta learn to think again, you gotta learn all kinds of skills that you had to shut down to survive. And so what many people in trauma did is they escaped to their brain and became a thinker, but they were just a robot, they weren't human, and they went, who needs feelings? Feelings are unnecessary, they just complicate life. So you're really working to become human again, and that means you got to engage all of you. So that leads to problems because I don't want to feel emotions, I don't even know how to identify my emotions, I've shut them down so long, I don't know how to express or manage my emotions. They just go from zero to a hundred in a nanosecond, and I get dysregulated in a heartbeat. And so you go, wow, I might be 50 years old, but I've got the emotional toolkit of a two-year-old. So it's like I gotta accept that I gotta go back in kind of age time and accept that I'm basically a two-year-old that's got a lot of learning to do about emotions that nobody ever taught to me. I I never got any of it. I'm gonna need some mentors, I'm gonna need some healthier people that can be my co-regulators, that can be my role models, that can help me. And so, what I want people to realize is to begin with, most people got to begin with the regulation of emotions stuff, because you're gonna get memories that are gonna trigger you, you're gonna get into situations that trigger you, and managing your emotions are key. And if you don't, that's when we do 90% of the damage to others, is when we get dysregulated, that's when we lash out, say stuff that we later regret. And so learning to manage emotions and not kind of give in to fight flight again and that overwhelm, freeze, whatever, um, is become is important. But we gotta connect and we gotta gain self-awareness with compassion. So if I can add that to the second piece, what I think many people, what happened with shame combined with the parenting that they grew up with, is that the parents thought the way to get a child to obey was to scare them, to drive them, to be harsh on them, to shame them. It was a very regimented military type environment. And so, what a child basically, if you want results, you gotta drive yourself, you gotta be hard on yourself. If you're soft on yourself, you the fear is you're just gonna lay back and be lazy. And so there's a fear of self-compassion built into this whole style of parenting. And so now in recovery, it's like I gotta be hard on myself. I can't cut myself a break, I gotta drive myself, I gotta beat myself up if I fail, because that's the only way I'm gonna get back on track. And there's been over a hundred tests done on what provides long-term motivation for people, and most people think it's gonna be kind of that severe discipline. And what they found is those work short-term but not long term. What works long term is self-compassion, learning to be kind to myself, learning to let myself be human, to work with myself. And so that self-compassion piece to me is is good. And then part of so I'm gonna add one more, part of to me, the key here is that all of life ultimately ends up being flows out of my core identity, who I think I am. And if that core identity is shame, I'm not good enough, I'm not lovable, if people see the authentic me, they'll reject me because I don't have value or anything worthwhile to offer. I gotta heal that core identity. And that is a lifelong journey, but you gotta get started on beginning to challenge the lies that you believe about yourself. And some of that comes with connecting with healthy people that reflect back more accurate pictures of yourself.

SPEAKER_00 43:54

Two things that that you talked about in there that I think were very important. One is that just self knowledge of Loan is not enough. And uh, you know, one of my one of my jokes, and I don't necessarily say this to you know to to clients, but you can almost measure how stuck somebody is by how many self-help books they have on their shelf, right? Um, because there's uh oftentimes we chase this idea that if we just found the right piece of information, if we just found like the the right set of sayings or things like that, and it all made sense that somehow everything would fall into place and and would be better. And I have just found that that is just not how things work. That we, you know, we're relational creatures and trauma comes from relationships. And particularly when we're talking about, you know, damage to the sense of self comes through our, you know, our attachment relationships. And so healing really kind of has to go through that that same pathway, right? That we need to have other people uh who can reflect back on us and allow us to experience being loved before we can internalize that sense of uh of feeling lovable and people reflecting back to us and allowing us to experience being safe, being able to be our dumb and stupid and sometimes nerdy selves without feeling it, you know, without feeling judged, and uh, you know, and and people accepting us for you know being our imperfect selves, that we really start having a sense of confidence that we're okay, that that people are safe, and that um and that that you know we can we can move forward and we can grow and we can heal. Um can I just speak to that very briefly?

SPEAKER_01 46:00

Because I think that's such a key thing for especially people in the beginning of recovery, is to me, there's two types of knowledge that people will acquire. You will acquire academic learned knowledge from books, from teachers, from YouTube, whatever. But there's an element of knowledge you only learn through experience. So I remember having clients that um you you you form some connection, you're working with them every day, you're talking to them, but I I set boundaries, and I I'm gotta be the one that's gotta set some healthy boundaries about what this relationship looks like. And so you get clients that want to push past those boundaries. Can I call you? Can I? And no, you can't. I see you every day, um, whatever. Can wait, well, can you make time for me this week? And no, I got plans, blah, blah, blah. And so they immediately feel rejection, they immediately feel that. Um, you're you're abandoning me, etc., all of those old feelings. And I go, no, I'm not. This is what healthy relationships look like. Love looks like, it's got boundaries. So they can get it kind of the concept academically, but they haven't experienced it yet, and it doesn't connect totally. So I here's what I just say to them: this is the kind of knowledge about love that you're only gonna learn by experiencing accepting these boundaries. And after you accept these boundaries for a few weeks or months, you're all of a sudden gonna go, oh, now I get what he's talking about. This actually makes the relationship healthier. But you would never learn that just by a textbook. You have to experience that. But to experience it means you got to sit in your uncomfortable emotions. And that's what you're avoiding. And I'm gonna nudge you and push you to actually sit in those and say they're not gonna kill you. You're actually gonna learn if you sit through these.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

Part of the recovery process, right, is um just learning how to sit with some of that discomfort. And, you know, one of the things that I I tell people is what feels real doesn't necessarily mean that it is real. And when you talked about the example of setting boundaries, and and boundaries are so are so critical, they're one of the things that allow us to maintain a sense of self in a in a world that is oftentimes very chaotic and shifting. It allows us to to determine who we're gonna let into our lives, how we're gonna manage our own energy and our focus and attention. And when we don't grow up with healthy boundaries, we oftentimes just don't have an intuitive sense of like what is what is normal. And when you're using that example of somebody's like, can I call you this weekend? I I've had I've had clients invite me to their parties, and I'm like, I appreciate that, uh, but that's not something that uh that I I can do, right? That's uh that's not appropriate. I'd like to ask one uh very important question, and then I'd I'd like to open it up for whatever else you'd like to like to share. One of the things that I know I struggled with, and I I a lot of my clients struggle with, and people that I know who've experienced trauma, is this sense of things have always sucked, they suck now, and they will always suck. I have always felt bad, I have I feel bad now, and it will feel like this forever, and there is no hope of change. How would you what would you say to that? How would you respond to that?

SPEAKER_01 49:53

To me, there's two key components, and I think uh just to highlight up front, this is such a common feeling amongst people from the more severe end of the complex trauma spectrum. So to me, there's two components that are part of this. One way to understand complex trauma is it's unresolvable problems and pain. So you have your needs aren't being met. You you try to resolve it, you cry, you get mad, you ask, but nobody's meeting your needs, so you can't resolve it. So now you have pain. And you try to resolve the pain, you can't resolve it. Then you have anxiety, then you have fear. Is anybody and so you get all of these painful emotions that you can't resolve. So what do you what do you then do with all of that? Well, you gotta stuff that emotion down because it's just too painful to get let it be in my my conscious mind all the time. And so to me, complex trauma to understand it is really there's these unresolvable pains, but then a child has this amazing capacity to hope. And so it's basically okay, I got a problem, but if I try this, it'll fix it. So dad's mad at me and dad's neglecting me, but maybe if I brought him coffee every morning, or maybe if I got straight A's. So soon as you try a new solution, so let's do option A, your hope goes back up. Okay, this is gonna work, okay, this is gonna solve the problem, and you do it. Oh, it didn't. So you you crash, your hopes crash, but but I got option B here. Maybe I'll cut the lawn for dad today, and then dad'll like and your hope goes back up. And so, what what a child has is this amazing capacity to keep hoping because there's more options in the bank that I can keep trying. And so, what I found is, and just in talking to clients, thousands of clients, that around 10 to 13, somewhere in that age, they started running out of options, which meant they started running out of hope. And so all of a sudden they got to a point where they go every time I get my hopes up and it doesn't work, not only do my hopes get dashed, which is painful, but I'm back to an even more painful problem. So, why should I even get my hopes up again? Because it hurts more to have my hopes dashed than to actually have dad mad at me. So I'm gonna stop hoping and I'm gonna accept that I'm hopeless, that there's no solution to this problem, it can't be resolved. So, really, what happens to me at that point is up till now the child's been a victim of authorities not being loving. They've been a legitimate victim. When they give up hope, they accept a constant victim status. Second thing that's happened is a child has been using all the agency they have, all the tools in their toolkit to try to resolve the problem. And they've concluded that that's the only toolkit available is what's in their little toolkit. And so when they run out of tools to try, they think they've run out of agency. So they go to feeling zero agency, which means I'm helpless, I'm hopeless, I'm eternally a victim. Some bring that into recovery because with that comes a very depressed, defeated, negative mindset about future that the rest of my history is gonna play out like this. I have zero agency to improve it. I have zero agency to do positive stuff to fix problems, I don't have tools. So as soon as something, a problem happens, they don't go to let's try. They go to hopeless, depressed, give up, throw in the towel. This is there's no point. And and that's how many live out their life. So, yeah, you have to begin to develop agency and realize I only was given a very small toolkit. There's actually quite a big toolkit available that I can learn. But what happens with some is they start using that toolkit and they start to hope again, and then something gets triggered inside of them. Don't get your hopes up. Every time you get your hopes up, they get dashed. So let's just sabotage this because something bad's gonna happen, anyways. So let's just get it over with and mess this whole thing up. So now we become our own worst enemy. We actually sabotage our own growth because we're afraid to hope again. And so to me, yes, there's breaking out of that victim mindset, developing agency, but then I got to be willing to risk hope again. And that there's three very painful steps there that I just outlined that are scary as anything, because each one is taking me, because as soon as I begin to develop agency, I might fail. If I fail, then I'm gonna get judged and I'm gonna get punished, and the that's the end of the world. So I can't fail. So now I have a fear of fear of failure, a fear of hope. It's this is scary business. And so, what I want clients to realize is every step of growth confronts a new fear that you didn't even realize was there. So now you're not just learning a tool, you're overcoming a fear. And fear isn't overcome by some magic formula, fear is overcome by choosing to walk into it, knowing I have tools. And then the fear goes away. It doesn't go away in advance, it goes away by walking into it, not away from it. But doing it with the right fears, whereas the child was trying to walk into it with no tools, and that just made the fear feel it was a monster that couldn't be defeated.

SPEAKER_00 56:24

Very well spoken. Um, as you were talking, two words or two phrases kind of came up to me, or came up for me. One was this whole idea of uh of just kind of internal emotional collapse that uh that is probably the best way that I can describe the experience of when you you like, all right, I'm gonna hope again. Yes, and then something small happens, and it's it's just like there's this just internal emotional collapse. And uh, and it's really, really scary to, you know, to to go, all right. Well, I'm gonna hope again, but you know, maybe let's let's do this differently this time and let's set some expectations. Because, you know, that that that fear thing is is so is such a huge component, right? And um what I found in my in my own rec uh in my own recovery and you know, and again in the folks that that I I work with is that uh you you can't avoid the fear, and you can't avoid experiencing some of the pain. You can't experience you can't help but go through self-doubt. You can't help but uh experience all of the the stuff that kind of keeps us stuck when you're moving forward. The the difference is, you know, can you just can you just muster enough agency to take just the the next little right step?

unknown 58:03

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 58:04

Because if you can just, you know, kind of stick through it and claw your way forward just a little bit, take the next little right step, you start building momentum in in a direction, and and over time things will become much, much easier and uh and your recovery trajectory will will move along at a at a much better pace than you know at in the very beginning. As you learn new tools, as you make new connections, as uh as you start experiencing some change, then there's this notion that change is possible. And that, you know, now I I've done some things that I I I know work, and now I can keep using some of those tools to pull myself forward. So, Tim, I I I I I would love this conversation to go for another four hours, but I want to be you have to be respectful of your time. So, what uh what are some last words that you would like to to share with with people?

SPEAKER_01 59:11

Well, I I just think what you've just shared, um just to expand a little bit on that for people, and that is I think the Western mindset has been for a long time that we can grow without any pain. And and what I want people to understand that there's clean pain and dirty pain. And in complex trauma, you had dirty pain. And what I meant mean by that is it pain that was unfair, that couldn't be resolved, that just got worse and worse. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, and it became s stifling, suffocating, debilitating, and it just added trauma and negative coping things to your life. So nothing good came out of dirty pain for you. Clean pain is surgery pain. It's getting your your broken arm reset and and your wound cleaned and stitched up. It leads to healing, it leads to growth. Yes, there's pain. And so I think what people always hope for coming out of recovery is I want to get all the right tools and then have a pain-free recovery. What I want people to realize is you're gonna have a clean pain recovery, and it's gonna get less and less as you go, but there's a pain element, there's negative emotions to be dealt with and resolved this time, not just left bottled up. There's new issues to be faced that are gonna involve some learning by failure, learning by trial and error, that's gonna feel like failure, but it's gonna be growth. There's going to be challenging, difficult, moving out of your comfort zone. All of that is part of healthy growth. So if I can end with this illustration, to me, it was very helpful in my own life. But when I look, when I became a dad and I watched my child take its first steps, what I remember was it took its first steps and it fell and landed on its face and started crying. I did not go, stupid kid, you can't do anything right. I was cheering that child, I was comforting that child, I was saying, get back up here, let's try this again. It took another couple steps and it fell flat again. I was like, what a loser. No, I didn't say any of that. I was like, this is exciting. Growth doesn't happen to go from zero to perfection in one step. You go from zero to per to being really good at something through years of practicing and practicing, and that involves failure and getting back up and resilience and trying new things and learning new skills. And it's hard work and it takes concentration, but the more you do it, the better you get until you can walk without even thinking about it. And so don't see recovery as this giant leap of one step where you do it perfectly the first time with zero pain. This is learning like walking, and you gotta accept the process just as much as you gotta accept all the ingredients of the process, and the process is slow and messy, and it's got a lot of hard work and pain, and that if you try to bypass that, you'll never get recovery.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:54

Very well said, Tim, thank you so much for uh for joining me today. This has been a fantastic conversation. And uh, if any of anybody out there wants to learn more about your work or take one of your online courses, where do they where do they go?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:14

Well, they can go to our website, timfletcher.ca, or they can go to our YouTube channel, just put Tim Fletcher in the search bar and they'll come up with our YouTube channel. And then both of those places will tell you about the types of courses. There's online courses that you just take on your own. There's you can meet in groups and and go through the Lyft program. There's all kinds of different types of things that are offered there. So either of those two places will get you to the information you want.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:46

Fantastic. And we're going to include those, the links to those in the description below as well. And um so thank I want to thank everybody for joining us today, and I look forward to seeing you all next week.