What To Do When Life Genuinely Sucks

It’s Psychology Sunday here at 10almonds, and today we’re going to be looking at:

• The Best Way To Face Difficult Times

• PTSD, but, well… Complex

  • What C-PTSD is

  • What it looks like

  • What to do about it

  • C-PTSD Resources

• Tell Yourself A Better Lie—Fixing the “wrong” lessons that you learned in life, by dismantling counterproductive beliefs (and most importantly: how to do that)

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

The Best Way to Face Difficult Times

Sometimes, life genuinely sucks, and no amount of optimism is going to change that. “Think and grow rich” works best if you’re already a millionaire living in a time of economic plenty! Similarly, “Cheer up, it might never happen” is not too compelling when “it” is in fact very visibly happening already right now!

Philosopher Alain de Botton, with his famously soothing voice that belies his pulls-no-punches truisms, has advice (cw: flashing lights in the intro):

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically

Photosensitive Epileptic? Use This Link Instead (skips the flashes in the first 30 seconds)

Prefer text? Read: On Living In A More Light-Hearted Way (transcript)

😵‍💫 MAIN FEATURE

PTSD, But, Well…. Complex.

PTSD is typically associated with military veterans, for example, or sexual assault survivors. There was a clear, indisputable, Bad Thing™ that was experienced, and it left a psychological scar. When something happens to remind us of that—say, there are fireworks, or somebody touches us a certain way—it'll trigger an immediate strong response of some kind.

These days the word "triggered" has been popularly misappropriated to mean any adverse emotional reaction, often to something trivial.

But, not all trauma is so clear. If PTSD refers to the result of that one time you were smashed with a sledgehammer, C-PTSD (Complex PTSD) refers to the result of having been hit with a rolled-up newspaper every few days for fifteen years, say.

This might have been...

• childhood emotional neglect

• a parent with a hair-trigger temper

• bullying at school

• extended financial hardship as a young adult

• "just" being told or shown all too often that your best was never good enough

• the persistent threat (real or imagined) of doom of some kind

• the often-reinforced idea that you might lose everything at any moment

If you're reading this list and thinking "that's just life though", you might be in the estimated 1 in 5 people with (often undiagnosed) C-PTSD.

How About You? Take The (5mins) Test Here

Now, we at 10almonds are not doctors or therapists and even if we were, we certainly wouldn't try to diagnose from afar. But, even if there's only a partial match, sometimes the same advice can help.

So what are the symptoms of C-PTSD?

• A feeling that nothing is safe; we might suddenly lose what we have gained

• The body keeps the score... And it shows. We may have trouble relaxing, an aversion to exercise for reasons that don't really add up, or an aversion to being touched.

• Trouble sleeping, born of nagging sense that to sleep is to be vulnerable to attack, and/or lazy, and/or negligent of our duties

• Poor self-image, about our body and/or about ourself as a person.

• We’re often drawn to highly unavailable people—or we are the highly unavailable person to which our complementary C-PTSD sufferers are attracted.

• We are prone to feelings of rage. Whether we keep a calm lid on it or lose our temper, we know it's there. We're angry at the world and at ourselves.

• We are not quick to trust—we may go through the motions of showing trust, but we're already half-expecting that trust to have been misplaced.

• "Hell is other people" has become such a rule of life that we may tend to cloister ourselves away from company.

• We may try to order our environment around us as a matter of safety, and be easily perturbed by sudden changes being imposed on us, even if ostensibly quite minor or harmless.

• In a bid to try to find safety, we may throw ourselves into work—whatever that is for us. It could be literally our job, or passion projects, or our family, or community, and in and of itself that's great! But the motivation is more of an attempt to distract ourselves from The Horrors™.

"Alright, I scored more of those than I care to admit. What now?"

A lot of the answer lies in first acknowledging to yourself what happened, to make you feel the way you do now. If you, for example, have an abject hatred of Christmas, what were your childhood Christmases like? If you fear losing money that you've accumulated, what underpins that fear? It could be something that directly happened to you, but it also could just be repeated messages you received from your parents, for example.

It could even be that you had superficially an idyllic perfect childhood. Health, wealth, security, a loving family... and simply a chemical imbalance in your brain made it a special kind of Hell for you that nobody understood, and perhaps you didn't either.

Unfortunately, a difficult task now lies ahead: giving love, understanding, compassion, and reassurance to the person for whom you may have the most contempt in the world: yourself.

If you'd like some help with that, here are some resources:

ComplexTrauma.org (a lot of very good free resources, with no need for interaction)

CPTSD Foundation (mostly paid courses and the like)

Some final words about healing…

• You are in fact amazing,

• You can do it, and

• You deserve it.

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Tell Yourself a Better Lie - by Marissa Peer

As humans, we generally lie to ourselves constantly. Or perhaps we really believe some of the things we tell ourselves, even if they’re not objectively necessarily true:

• I’ll always be poor

• I’m destined to be alone

• I don’t deserve good things

• Etc.

Superficially, it’s easy to flip those, and choose to tell oneself the opposite. But it feels hollow and fake, doesn’t it? That’s where Marissa Peer comes in.

Our stories that we tell ourselves don’t start where we are—they’re generally informed by things we learned along the way. Sometimes good lessons, sometimes bad ones. Sometimes things that were absolutely wrong and/or counterproductive.

Peer invites the reader to ask “What if…”, unravel how the unhelpful lessons got wired into our brains in the first place, and then set about untangling them.

“Tell yourself a better lie” does not mean self-deceit. It means that we’re the authors of our own stories, so we might as well make them work for us. Many things in life are genuinely fixed; others are open to interpretation.

Sorting one from the other, and then treating them correctly in a way that’s helpful to us? That’s how we can stop hurting ourselves, and instead bring our own stories around to uplift and fortify us.

Get Your Copy of “Tell Yourself A Better Lie” on Amazon Today!

Wishing you all the health and productivity you deserve,

The 10almonds Team