Walking on eggshells?

[dewachen]

Hi,
I have been told by a couple of people that they walk on eggshells around me and that I take things personally. I can't see it but I guess it must be true, so I need to work on this. Has anyone got any experiences on how to be less reactive, please? Thank you 😊

[saylor]

The way I currently understand it, the reactivity that follows taking something personally stems from a sense of threat. One reacts in defense to threat. The thing one is defending is one's ego/sense of "self" (felt as being separate from the rest of the world, to a sort of "pathological" degree, I suppose).

Apparently, there are ways to tame the influence of ego, such as (non-dual) meditation or controlled use of certain types psychedelics that reduce activity in certain areas of the brain that enforce that sense of separateness

[Kizzie]

Hey dewachen, one way I learned to turn down the volume on my reactivity was I took an online CBT course.  I'm not a fan of CBT as a cure all for CPTSD, but what it did for me was help me learn to slow down and question my reactions before I acted on them.

When we were being abused we needed to react quickly so we could respond to the trauma we were experiencing & flee, fight, freeze or fawn to help keep us safe.  These reactions become almost automatic so we have to learn to  see/feel what we are doing, slow down and assess whether there is any real danger and interrupt that automatic response. 

This is the course I did  - https://www.learntolive.com/  - but there are quite a few out there now from what I can see.

Hope this helps