Welcome.

I'm Andy Carlson and you're listening to the Time with Tim podcast.

Today we're sharing one of Tim's insightful talks, originally published on YouTube.

Whether this is your first time or you've been with us for a while, we hope this lecture inspires reflection and offers helpful tools for your journey.

Let's take this time to learn together.

Well, welcome to another Friday night.

We've been taking a deeper look at the sixty characteristics of complex trauma, and today we come to they don't know who they are people from complex trauma.

One of the things I hear them say to me very often is I don't know who I am.

So I want to look at why that is and then begin to look at some helpful, very practical tools in learning who we are.

So to begin, why don't people from complex trauma know who they are?

And I want to give you four reasons why that is so.

So, if you think of a child coming into the world, they have all of these competing needs and drives inside of them.

So one of the needs is our drives is to be authentic, to be who they are.

But they also have a need to be loved to be accepted to connect with other people.

And so a child coming into the world, if it's in a healthy home, they're able to be authentic, and they wait, will I be accepted, Will I be loved?

And yes, they are accepted, Yes they are loved.

Yes they connect.

And so in their mind, being authentic is a good thing, and I can just be me and I can be loved and connected for who I am.

But bring that in complex trauma.

The child comes into an unhealthy situation and they decide to be authentic, but that doesn't work so well for them.

No one wants to connect with them.

They're punished or laughed at, or teased or criticized for parts of who they are when they're authentic.

And so what they quickly realize is if I want to be loved, if I want to connect with people, I have to hide who I am.

I can't be authentic, and so I have to learn how to wear masks.

I have to learn how to sense what other people want from me and become what they want.

Be a chameleon.

I have to.

Adopt different roles in situations so that people will like me, respect me, and want to be my friend.

And so very early on.

They have this core belief that develops, I can't be who I am, I have to be somebody else.

So that leads to not knowing who they really are because the earlier in life you had to wear masks and not be authentic and adopt the greater chance that you don't know who you are because you've always worn masks, always played roles.

So that's the first reason.

The second characteristic of children coming into life is just a natural curiosity.

So they come into life and they explore, they try new things, sports, hobbies, painting, music, and they spend time just dreaming about stuff in a fantasy world of what they would like to be one day.

And if you're in a safe world, you can do that.

And when you're in.

Safety, your cortex works.

At its maximum and it allows you to be curious and to explore, and all of that leads to a child figuring out what they're good at, figuring out who they are, figuring out their personality.

But bring in complex trauma.

When you're in survival mode, the cortex isn't working very well, and you can't be concerned about being curious about life and exploring.

You're all about what do I have to do to survive.

You're in fight flight.

You're not in curiosity mode, and so you can't figure out.

Who you are.

You're just trying to survive.

And then beyond that, part of what makes life unsafe for some children is that they grow up in families of abuse.

Swear they are just made servants or slaves by their parents, and it's just work work.

They don't have time to go out and play sports or do things with friends and other hobbies, and so it's just they're working, serving and they don't get a chance to figure out who they are.

Or some have a father who's a dictator, and he tells them how to think, how to feel.

He tells them what jobs they should take, He allows only certain activities and forbids other types of hobbies.

He might even tell them what university courses and career they should pursue.

He regulates and controls their life.

They don't have a chance to figure out who they are.

And then some parents they want their child to fulfill their dream for the child.

They want their child to be a doctor or an NHL player.

They don't let the child explore what they're good at, what their personality is.

The child is forced to carry out the parents' dreams for them, and they don't get a chance to figure out who they are or what they want to do with their life.

And then another aspect of a child living in an environment where they're safe is they get to connect with themselves.

They get to explore.

Their internal world, not just the external world.

And so they can think about their emotional world, they can explore their thoughts and what they feel about different things.

They can dream, they can plan, and they can get to know their impulses and their emotions and their thought where all their internal world, they can explore that, and then they can explore what is it I want to do with my life?

What's my purpose?

What do I have a passion for?

All of that happens in a safe environment, in a healthy family, But what happens in complex trauma you're surviving.

You don't want to explore your internal world because your internal world is made up of painful emotions that you can't resolve.

Therefore need to disconnect from your internal world, and so you disconnect from your emotions, You disconnect from a lot of your thinking, you disconnect from your passions and sense of purpose.

You're just trying to survive and not feel, and so you don't connect to your external world or to your internal world.

You don't have time to explore dreams, all of that stuff.

There's one other aspect of what happens to a child in a healthy world when they're authentic versus a child and complex trauma.

In a healthy world, if you're allowed to be authentic and your parents provide a loving environment, safe environment, if your parents are living fairly healthy life and role modeling healthy behaviors, you're in a world where you're learning about hard work and on a and reliability and respect.

But what happens if you're a child in complex trauma where it's very unsafe and you don't have good role models, Well, you have to lie to survive.

You can't be always reliable because some days you're running.

You have an anger problem because you fight back, you avoid, you shut down.

You develop ways of coping that let you survive, but they aren't healthy.

And so what happens is you're actually building kind of a dark side, a part of you that is very dishonest, very unreliable, very disrespectful.

That dark side is where you have to live in order to survive.

And so what I find with some clients is when they get into recovery, into a safe environment and they are looking at themselves, they go, I don't know who I am, but I'm afraid I'm my dark side, that that's the real me.

And sadly, for many that is a very discouraging thought that causes them to feel I'm too messed up.

But because their dark side had to be so big in order to survive, they really don't know who the real little then is underneath that dark side.

So what I want to do tonight is just look at are there practical tools that can help us find out who we are?

And so let's begin with what makes us who we are?

How do you.

Define in general categories, what makes a human a human?

So let me give you three areas that are important in my mind that define who we are.

So number one, we have a personality.

And what I mean by a personality is our basic wiring that governs how I interact with the world, how I think, my learning style, how I process information, how I feel loved, how.

I want to give love.

It is basically my unique wiring that makes me different from everybody.

It comes in it is born into me.

I'm hardwired with it, and so it'll make me outgoing, shy, it'll make me a leader, a follower, very detail oriented, et cetera.

That's my basic personality.

Everybody has one, everybody's is a little bit different.

The second thing is we all come into the world with certain things that we're just naturally good at.

Skills, talent abilities.

So some are just naturally just gifted in sports.

Others are very klutxy in sports.

Others are great with math, others are terrible with math.

Some love abstract stuff, some need very concrete stuff.

Some are great very artistic.

Some love music, some love organizing.

Some are great in drama, theater and acting.

Some love to cook, some are great at teaching.

All of those skills are part of who we are, and again we're born with those, but they have to develop as we try different things, as we learn about those things.

And then the third part of what makes us who we are is our deepest passions.

What is our purpose for life?

What excites us?

And so some people get really excited about certain topics, history, philosophy, and they just want to explore that.

Others have a passion for helping people or for helping animals, or for helping underprivileged people build into all of us.

There's a certain passion that defines what we feel is our purpose for being alive.

So those three three things just are helpful categories and understanding what makes us human.

So what I want to do now is give you a basic personality test.

Let me say a couple things about that.

There's lots of different personality tests available today.

I went on the internet and there's a number of personality tests that you can do on the internet for free.

There's Myers Briggs, which is one of the most popular ones, been around a long time.

Personality tests help us figure out what our personality is.

But what I have found in giving personality test tests to people in recovery from trauma and addiction is that the question becomes is this personality test helping them see their true personality or is it just identifying the masks and.

Roles that they've adopted.

Because when a lot of people do a personality test and ask them a question, they don't think of it in terms of the real them because they don't know the real them.

They answer it based on the mass they've worn and the roles they've adopted and kind of what they were made to feel they were good at by others, which could have been they were pressured into certain kinds of behavior and validated for it.

And so personality tests for people from complex trauma can be very helpful, but they can also not be as defined and clear as we would hope them to be.

And one of the things I've done with clients is have them take a personality test and then a year later take it again, and many find that their answers changed a lot because over that last past year they dropped a lot of masks, they began to understand who they really were.

And so I'm going to go through parts of a personality test today just to give you a flavor, but again I want you to be mindful of the fact that your answer today might change if you're still early in recovery and you're still not sure who the real you is, whether it's the same as your mass or different from your mass.

So let me give you a bunch of questions.

So the first one, are you usually option A a good mixer or rather quiet and reserve so you can mark A or B.

Two, when you were with a group of people, would you usually rather join in the talk of the group or talk with one person at a time.

Three do you usually prefer to hang around with others or be on your own?

Four After a long, exhausting week, Option eight, a social event is what you need.

Be an evening by yourself is what you need?

Five do you tend to have broad friendships with different people or deep friendships with a.

Very few people.

Six you're waiting in a long line?

Would you chat to someone in line?

Or play on your phone or look at the floor.

Seven you are looking for an apartment.

Would you have a roommate or would you prefer to live alone?

So, out of those sets, answer A is what would be called an extrovert.

So if you answered all A, you would be classified as an extrovert.

If you answered B, you'd be classified as an introvert.

Now, many people have a concept around being an introvert.

An extrovert that is basically defined as an introvert is shy.

An extrovert is outgoing, And there might be there's an element of truth to that, but that misses really the key distinction between an introvert and an extrovert.

An introvert, in order to recharge their batteries needs time alone, healthy self care alone.

An extrovert, in order to recharge their batteries needs to be with people.

Another way to say that is, for an introvert, being with people drains them a lot, being alone recharges them.

Extroverts being alone can actually be draining for them.

Being with people recharges them.

Now, having said that, I want you to understand something up front, recharging batteries our own batteries requires connection.

We need connection to ourself.

We need connection usually to a higher power, and to one person.

So an introvert just needs one person.

An extrovert needs lots of people that they can connect with.

So think of the challenges in recovery.

Introverts need time alone in order to recharge their batteries.

But the danger for them is they cross a line, so they go from withdrawing in order to recharge to isolating, and isolating is actually a very draining thing.

It doesn't recharge them at all.

It leads to mental health problems, depression, etc.

And so introverts need to connect with people and figure out the difference between healthy withdrawal and isolation, and that is a challenge, and many introverts are shy and so in order to connect with people and build a new support network that's healthy, they have to fight through shyness.

In other words, they got to fight through a lot of fear about connecting, about being authentic with people when they are quite reserved, quite shy.

An extrovert, they need to be with lots of people.

But they're dangers.

That's all they want to do.

They never want to be alone, they never want to connect with self.

They just want to connect with people.

And so for an extrovert in recovery, they need to learn the value of time alone, connecting with self, and they need to do it in small doses, but they do need to learn to do it.

Now, let me add one other piece here.

Many children from complex trauma who were introverts hated that they were introverts, and they looked at extroverts and they said, they're the ones that have all the friends.

They seem so happy all the time.

I wish I was an extrovert.

And they saw extroversion as a strength and introversion as a weakness.

But what I want you to understand is introverts are just as important as extroverts.

One is not better than the other.

They're just different, and an introvert brings strengths that an extrovert doesn't have, and an extrovert brings strengths that an introvert doesn't have.

And so for an introvert, if you were one who hated being an introvert and saw it as a weakness, I just hope you can connect, accept it and see the strengths you bring that come out of your introversion that an extrovert does not have.

Okay, let me go on to a couple more questions.

So Number eight, when you go somewhere for the day, would you rather a plan what you will do and when or b just go and see what happens?

Number nine?

Do you prefer to arrange.

Parties, dates, vacations well in advance or be free to do whatever looks like fun when the time comes?

Number ten, when it is settled.

Well in events that you will do a certain thing at a certain time.

So if somebody gives you a schedule, do you find it nice to be able to plan accordingly or a little unpleasant to be tied down so much?

Eleven does following a schedule a appeal to you or cramp you?

Twelve?

Is your death super organized?

Or a jumble of everything you're working on.

Thirteen Does the idea of making a list of what you should get done over the weekend a appeal to you or B leave you cold or c positively depress you?

Fourteen Do you often have a backup plan for your backup plan?

Aes B.

No.

So that's just identifying two other types of personality components, which is A being very organized, B being spontaneous.

More spontaneous.

Now, this is where it can get tricky with people from complex trauma, because you realize that a complex trauma person can be hyper organized because they're a control freak.

That's not necessarily who they are.

That's what they had to do to survive.

Or a person from complex trauma can be so used to chaos and living in chaos that that's what they still do today, and they do everything at the last moment spontaneously.

They don't plan, because you can't plan when you're in chaos, and so that is not necessarily who they are, that's just what came out of living in danger, complex trauma chaos.

And so what I want you to understand again is often organize people, they look down on spontaneous type people.

They see them as lazy, as immature, as irresponsible.

But yet, spontaneous people often look down and organized people.

They see them as boring, as never having fun, as rigid.

But again, one's not better than the other.

One's not good, on's not bad.

They're just different.

We need organized people, we need spontaneous people.

They both bring qualities that make life work.

And so, if you're highly organized, learn how you can use that to help others.

Learn the positives.

If you're spontaneous, learn the positives of that.

But if that's.

Part of your complex trauma control freak versus being very unorganized, deal with those issues as well.

Cay, let me give you another couple questions.

Are you very sentimental?

Yes or no?

Sixteen?

Do you consider yourself to be a warm, empathetic or be very logical?

Seventeen?

Do you share your emotion freely or do you keep your feelings to yourself?

You're more stoic, more reserved.

So those are pointing too.

Is a person kind of more thinking based or more emotionally based?

Are they driven more by their emotions or by their logic?

Again, not not good, bad, but different, And so that's just how we all are wired differently some more questions.

Do you contemplate the meaning of life or what happens after death?

A?

Often?

B rarely?

Nineteen Do you enjoy thinking about philosophy, theories about life, theories about happiness?

Or B the here and now?

What we know what needs to get done?

Those point two are bent on we enjoy what we like to think about?

Number twenty Do you consider yourself to be a a practical realistic person or be a creative imaginative person?

Twenty one?

In doing something that many other people can do, does it appeal to you more to A do it in the accepted way or be Analyze how it is done and if you see how it could be improved, invent a way of your own.

Twenty two Are you the type of person who spends a lot of time analyzing why things are the way they are?

Or B just enjoys life?

See Do you consider yourself to be conventional you like to do things the way they've always been done, or be creative you like to look for new ways to do things.

Twenty four Do you see yourself as a person who color inside the lines or be who colors outside the lines?

So again, are you analytical?

Are you conventional or are you creative?

How do you process information?

How do you approach life?

All of that is part of personality.

Let me just give you a couple other categories when it comes to thinking about your personality.

So one of the things we would I would look for in people is how observant are they?

Are they very observant or are they just la la la and don't notice very much.

One's not better than the other, They're just different.

Are they a very serious minded person or very care free type person?

Are they an intense driven type a personality person?

Are they very laid back, very casual?

Are they a natural leader or do they naturally follow?

Are they very detail oriented or are they very big picture oriented?

Are they very task oriented or are they connecting with people oriented?

What is their natural bent?

What appeals to them more?

Do they learn best by listening, by reading, or by doing all of those things?

We're all a bit different.

All of those things make us who we are.

Those are our personalities.

So let me just go to then how can I just keep growing in this area?

So you can take a personality test?

And like I said, there's many that are free that you can get online.

And I would encourage you to do it.

I think you'll find it quite fascinating to do it one that is quite thorough.

But don't just stop there.

Do you want to get to know who you are?

Be like that child who is curious.

So try new things you've never tried before, Try new hobbies, try new activities.

Now I need to tell you this that trying new things will trigger fear, because the fear is what happens if I can't do it and I look stupid?

What happens if I fail?

What?

And that could trigger your shame?

That could trigger all kinds of other fears.

So in order for you to find out who you are, my point is you got to walk through fear because it's going to trigger fears left and right as you begin to explore and be curious about finding out who you are, what you like, what you're good at.

Third thing I'd suggest is to ask somebody who knows you well, who's fairly healthy, to mirror back to you what you're like, what your personality like, what your natural gifts and talents are, what you're good at, what you seem to have a passion for, what your strengths and weaknesses are, and if it's a person who loves you and values you and respects you.

They can do that in a way that just.

Helps you get a more accurate picture and you don't feel judged or shamed by what they say.

And then I would encourage you to read books about personalities, about styles of learning, all of those things that we've talked about, but also read biographies of people who've impacted the world, our culture, because sometimes as you read those biographies, you get in touch with your own passion, You get in touch with what you want your purpose in life to be.

Now, I have to end by saying this, how long does it take a child in a healthy home to figure out who they are?

They are?

It takes years.

They start curiosity and exploring at a very young age, and they have to do that for years.

And then they get in their teens and they can try more things and get a better sense of what their skills are, and hopefully by the time they're into their twenties, they're getting a pretty good idea as to who they are.

So why do I tell you that?

Because so many people from complex trauma who are now in their thirties and forties, they come and say, tell me who I am and they want some way to figure it out in a week.

It's going to take you a while to figure out who you are.

That's okay.

Be patient with the process.

You'll gradually figure it out out.

The other thing I want to just say in conclusion is this, Remember a child can only figure out who they are when they're in a safe environment.

It's only there they can be authentic.

It's only there they can be curious.

It's only there they can explore their internal world.

So you need if you're going to figure out who you are today.

You need safe people.

You need safe.

Environment so that you can begin that exploration process.

So my desire, my hope as I work with people is I want to get them, but then I want them to be able to figure out who they are to get themselves.

And it is so exciting to see people beginning to figure out who they are.

It gives them a sense of purpose, it gives them a sense of joy.

That's just beautiful to watch.

Thank you for joining us on the Time with Tim podcast.

If you'd like to share your own experiences or have questions, feel free to email us at podcasts at Tim Fletcher dot ca.

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Take care and thank you for letting us be a part of your healing journey.