Self-help books can trigger me

[Unbroken1]

I was wondering if this happens with anyone else. Over the years I have read dozens of self-help books to try to deal with what I thought was codependency over the years. Including Deepak Chopra, John Bradshaw, The Secret. Anthony Robbins, etc. before I discovered the work of Pete Walker, Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine.

But after a while, whenever I considered "working on myself" via those particular types of self-help books, I felt shame and a sense of futility (even to this day) because nothing was helping over the long term, regardless of what I was reading and practicing. So the whole self-help genre - except for works on CPTSD or recovery from toxic/NPD relationships, which are giving me hope after 30 years of CBT - has the effect of making me feel "not good enough."  So the notion of trying to help myself this way can be triggering in and of itself.

Among the CPTSD survivors here, I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this?

[Kizzie]

I can relate Unbroken.  One book in particular is Pete Walker's CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving.  I end up asking myself why am I not thriving after all I've done to feel better. 

I think if you're on the minimal end of the CPTSD spectrum, you probably can do a lot of self-help successfully, but moderate to more severe CPTSD, I don't think self-help alone will get you through recovery.  Just my opinion of course.  I say this because of impact of constant traumatic stress on our bodies and brains and the changes that causes which need actual treatment.  The more the trauma, the more need for treatment.

Unfortunately because Complex PTSD was only recently recognized, effective treatments have lagged, but I do see some on the horizon (e.g., psychedelic assisted therapy, neurofeedback), and a desire on the part of clinicians to do better for us.

So I guess my take away is don't beat yourself up, IMO there's only so much most of us can do without a helping, knowledgeable and caring hand in real life. 



 

[Blueberry]

So I guess my take away is don't beat yourself up, IMO there's only so much most of us can do without a helping, knowledgeable and caring hand in real life. 

Kizzie, my take on Pete Walker's books is that those were his methods towards thriving but not necessarily everybody's. cptsd is complex, I guess because humans are complex beings, so cptsd doesn't have an all-cure for everybody.

Also, authors are in the business of selling their books, so are publishers. They use titles to partially reflect that.

The first self-help book I remember reading was one where a therapist's clients were up and cured and thriving after max. 2 years despite multiple abuse in childhood. Sigh. I felt less-than for ages.

Though there are some OOTS mbrs who seem closer to the thriving end of the spectrum than the surviving.

Unbroken, it wasn't till this year - after years of therapy - that I was given a dissociative diagnosis on top of the cptsd, which helps explain why I'm not really healing. Also the abuse is ongoing though I'm VLC with FOO. I understand the sense of futility.

[CactusFlower]

I agree, they can trigger the guilt and failure sometimes. They give off this sense of... I guess... an expectation that all you have to do is follow their instructions and/or complete the book and you'll be fixed. Nothing works that easily. I'm doing the Courage to Heal Workbook and I appreciate that they say you don't have to do it all or any particular order. Other books, that also triggers my perfectionism to have everything complete and done well in a linear fashion. I personally think Walker's book is for someone much further along the path. I can't even predict an EF coming, let alone think of his 13-point list or whatever about them.

[woodsgnome]

Yes, I totally concur with the reverse side-effects that can arise from prancing through so many self-help titles. They've almost become such a broad category as to be nearly useless. It's kind of like other reading, though -- you don't know until you try out, or at least consider, a few ideas (or a lot).

I certainly know the triggering side, and am now very careful about diving in, as if these authors will truly tell me some grand notion I'm better off accessing via my heart-feelings. Then again, I'm a voracious reader, and would best characterize my reading as a form of "free lance bibliotherapy". There are actually therapists who use this approach; the difference with me is I generally pick out my own reads, and sometimes have several going on at once. Another advantage for me is I have lots of time.

I guess the best approach to it all is to always read with a note of skepticism, and to let one's own heart discern what seems useful or not. Many of us, having been subjected to all sorts of baloney in the first place, had our 'trouble detectors' built in, so to speak. So it can be a paradox -- having survived so much abuse is one thing, but if one can survive at all, perhaps the healthiest outcome is to have gone through so much hurt and disbelief that it stimulates the search for other ways. This might  starting with self-help reads, but can include many other genres, too.

These can become self-triggering if one isn't careful, though -- for me, that means keeping my skeptical antenna in place. Some of what is suggested might indeed be useful. But the skepticism acts like a valve keeping one's heart open to help make up one's own mind. In the end, this seems like the best 'self-help' -- coming from one's own self, while being selective regarding all the 'experts'. Which might, or might not, be helped by the avalanche of books labeled as self-help (many, of course, for marketing reasons).

In the end, what's helped the most, for me, has been to more highly regard authors like Pete Walker and Carolyn Spring, who have 'walked the talk' by striving to find their own path towards achieving at least a better sense of self-love and compassion. Even with these, though I keep my skepticism within reach. As someone else once said, "skepticism is a virtue."

[Bach]

It's such a relief to read this thread and know that I'm not the only one who has this problem.  I can never actually read a self-help book or do a workbook, all I can ever do is look at bits and pieces and feel guilty because I don't know how to make any of it help me.  I have reached a point where I feel that informing myself about why I have issues and thinking about how they pertain to my life and my behaviour just doesn't help anymore.  There's always a feeling of "Yeah, yeah, I know this stuff, now what am I supposed to DO about it?!?"  So lately I am really into exercises for toning the vagus nerve.  The vagus nerve governs the regulation of the physiological nervous system, and the exercises are small, simple physical actions that can be performed for the purpose of balancing nervous system responses.  Supposedly practicing these exercises over time will result in making the nervous system more flexible, less susceptible to being triggered, faster recovery from being triggered, lower levels of general anxiety, etc.  That's a long-term project, but it is what is currently giving me hope for some day not having to constantly experience the pain of the battle that has raged all my life between my body's hypervigilance and my brain's attempts to dissociate from it so that I can bear to keep living. 

Here is an Instagram account that offers simple actionable tips for balancing the nervous system at times of stress based on that theory:
https://instagram.com/annatheanxietycoach?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Looking at that account can get overwhelming too, but I like the way that the nature of Instagram means it is presented in manageable bite-sized pieces.

[Kizzie]

Note: This post was actually authored by Papa Coco in another thread because he couldn't find this one.  I've cut and pasted it here so there's a sense of flow.  - Kizzie

I was creating a response to a fresh post from a new member, who said that Self-help books can be triggers. While I was writing, the original post either vanished, or somehow, I simply can't find it. This response to that post is something I want to talk about anyway, so here's my response to the question about self-help books and their ability to create shame in me.

I will chime in. Yes. And I really like this topic. Thanks for bringing it up. I deal with a lot of shame for being me.  Self-help books are a double-edged sword for me too. Bad therapists are a problem for me also, and those wonderful one-liner quips people post on social media are also a problem for me. Every single one of them makes me feel like another healthy person is telling me to "just get healthy" and if I can't, then it must be further proof that I'm choosing to be a failure at life.  Every time anyone offers me their version of a cure, and that cure doesn't magically fix my problem, it reinforces the false sense that I'm just garbage and no cures work on me. In my fractured brain, these "cures" are just setups for another failure.

I was raised Catholic, which, to me is a synonym for shameful. I grew up being told "You're too emotional for your own good" and "why can't you just let go and stop thinking about the past?" "Water under the bridge." (Like years of sexual and emotional abuse are just water under the bridge, right?)  As a child, and an adult, my Catholic family and my Catholic school teachers/nuns/priests would never coach us kids by addressing our actions, they would go straight for the shame button. When you ask a 6-year-old, "Why do you have to be so emotional?" or "What made you think THAT was a good idea?" The true answer should be "because I'm 6." Instead I stood there and swallowed the daily verbal poison they were feeding me. To a 6-year-old, being told that any mistakes you make are because you've chosen to be a bad person...well...that just adds gasoline to the dumpster fire that is your life in the making. I can't count how many times my selfish mother told me "I don't know what I'm supposed to do with you." I had no answers. I just felt the chronic shame that I was somehow choosing to be a burden on her. I swallowed all that poison every day of my life.

To me, self-help books, Cognitive Behavioral Therapists (CBTs), (who I call Dog Trainers), and uplifting quips on social media bring me back to feeling like the healthy people are telling me to just stop consciously choosing to be broken.

I read the first half of Pete Walker's book, which, for me was a powerful good read. But for some reason I put it down half-way through so I wouldn't read his tips for how to overcome any of it. Until this moment, I didn't know why I couldn't bring myself to read the second half, but now that you bring this up, I'm thinking it's because deep down inside my trauma-brain, I'm trying to protect myself from being told to "just stand up and get over it."  I now have a very good Dialectical Behavioral Therapist (DBT) who teaches me to accept my quirks as the part of me who is lovingly trying to protect the traumatized parts of me from repeated danger. I had 7 CBTs before I found this DBT. All 7 of them left me feeling like a failure because their cure of screaming into pillows didn't cure my biologically rewired traumatized brain. A year after each of them had "cured me" I was suicidal again. Incurable. How shameful of me to be immune to the cure SEVEN TIMES. and how shameful of me to not be cured after reading dozens of self-help books!

My DBT has helped me to see that by not reading the second half of Pete's book, I was subconsciously trying to protect myself from being shamed again for not being able to make his cures cure me. Having never read the second half, I don't know if that's even what he did, but AVOIDANCE is one of my self-protection tricks, and my brain isn't doing it to hurt me, it's lovingly trying to help me not go into the shame again of being incurable. He gave me some words that I use now when shame slaps me: I imagine my protective self talking to my frightened self: "I'm with you. I'm for you.  You are in me. And I am in you." To me, that type of integrating my fractured brain is working much better than CBT's preprogrammed rhetoric: "Let's scream into a pillow." or "If you don't read the book I've recommended, then how is it going to help you?"

I'm terrible about taking full responsibility for everything I've ever done wrong, and for everything everyone else has done wrong too. I was raised as the scapegoat in my family for all the terrible things my siblings or parents did. When they were unhappy or in trouble, somehow it was always my fault. Self-help books sort of bring me back to that feeling that I'm accountable for my PTSD. It's MY fault I'm too emotional for my own good. My fault I can't sleep at night. My fault I have eating disorders and bouts with super-intense depression.

[Kizzie]

Note: This post was authored by Woodsgnome, also in another thread but belongs here.
[/b]

Lots of good points here, Papa Coco. I share in many ways the same reactions to self-help and how it models a blame-the-victim mentality. And of course, "it's always your fault" was a common theme  of guilt-trips throughout my childhood.

Alas, I kept falling into similar patterns (I think I was so desperate to find someone I could trust that caused me to repeat falling into the blame-myself game). In one instance I had a narcissist boss who totally destroyed a dream job under his employ -- and it all started (and concluded) with the same "it's all your fault" routine. Not till later did I learn that he'd used the same manipulations with others.

This same eagerness to trust someone who has an answer for all one's problems reminds me of a current popular author who exhibits this blame-the-victim message in her own self-help 'solutions'. Years ago this self-help guru invented a phrase she uses all the time, sadly one which gets praised by others in the professional class of self-helpers.

Her astonishing realization? She accuses any who don't tag along with her theories of inflicting their own self-woundedness and labels it as "woundology". When I first saw it, it stood out as just the latest example of blame-the-victim for how awful they are, and how they themselves perpetuate their own miseries. Yuk  .

Thanks again for your input here. Your commentary regarding religious/spiritual abuse is also very similar to my own background in a similar setting. Somehow I had and retain a sense of humour to absorb some of the horrors these supposed religious bunch of hypocrites inflicted on myself and others. I just call them the "gawdawfuls" ... the hurts are all still there but at least I can find that much 'gallows humour' to ease my bruised memories.

[Kizzie]

Note and this one was by Phil also in the other thread 

I really like this topic... and I agree with so much written above.

I had a memory pop up on Facebook of one of those self-help memes
It was
Sometimes you feel buried.. Maybe it's your time to bloom

It's funny all those messages really irk me most of the time for the same reasons listed above, but occasionally some of them I find quite helpful. I thought it really just mattered on my mood of the day, ie how present I am.. but I find some still bug me now and I've felt quite present for a couple of months.

Quote from: Papa Coco on August 09, 2022, 03:57:43 PM
I now have a very good Dialectical Behavioral Therapist (DBT) who teaches me to accept my quirks as the part of me who is lovingly trying to protect the traumatized parts of me from repeated danger.


I totally believe you have hit the nail on the head here Papa *or your DBT has...
I can beat myself up for my quirks (and boy oh boy do i have them) or I can accept them like you said as ways I was lovingly (i like that word added in there) trying to keep myself safe.

I am currently working hard still.. but on changing some of my quirks because they no longer help me.. they in fact are hurting me. But it's a slow process and I'm grateful for small improvements I have made.

Thanks for sharing on this topic. I usually just ignore self-help catch-phrases as they are definitely triggering, but I have to admit to having some written in front of me right now to remind me of things I need to be reminded of. (ie "be grateful always" and "do something different today if you want a different result"). And even those 2 tick me off sometimes because of what seems like blanket advice- that doesn't seem empathetic enough to the fact that they are ridiculously difficult, pretty near impossible, especially when I'm not really present (which I don't blame myself for).

[Kizzie]

Note: And last but not least is this reply by the OP Unbroken.

Hi, I'm the OP for this subject over at https://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=14887.msg123663#msg123663

I can see that the subject resonates with a lot of people based on the responses. I appreciate all the nuanced discussions about why this strikes a chord but for me it is really about falling victim to society and popular culture's constant messaging about how flawed we are and how you can fix yourself by devoting your life to hustle culture or whatever the zeitgeist of the moment is.

This was part of the message I got growing up through the media. My parents were complicit as they trained me to be a shiny object that their friends and relatives were supposed to admire and at the same time taught me to erase myself by silencing me (ie, gaslighting) as I got older.

My biggest personal demon is the Not Good Enough monster that whispers to my psyche 24/7. This is my inner critic and my nature as a perfectionist means that I'll always fall short of achieving the peace of mind that self-help books promise. So I have yet another standard that I've failed to achieve.

I have much empathy for anyone who feels this way. It is a terrible burden to feel like no matter what I do it won't make any difference. But the recent works published by Pete Walker, Peter Levine et al which are focused on recognizing and learning to have self-compassion in recovery are the only works I've read that don't make me feel like there is some thing I missed while everyone else got the whole Thriving in Life package rather the Striving in Life version. For the first time in 30 years of CBT I'm finally starting to feel a glimmer of hope.

[Unbroken1]

I just found this article that brilliantly addresses the issue I (the OP) posted about: https://themighty.com/topic/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/trauma-cant-let-it-go

[woodsgnome]

Thanks, Unbroken1, for this article.

I can relate in a huge way to those expectations of finding the magic pathway leading straight to recovery. Followed by another set of dashed hopes, if not even worse flare-ups of feeling like it's all hopeless from the start. And then we start again. Go figure, as shouldn't we know better the futility of hope; and yet, we try again, anyway.

There are answers, neither as easy as they're made to sound or even that radically different from our failed protocols of coping. I don't know, my sense there is that the answer is that no, none of what happened can wholly provide the relief we'd like to imagine can be found. It's a rotten mess, sad and maddening. Yet I guess it's what survivors do, in order just to live.

I could ramble even further afield, and that in itself illustrates how frantic any search for healing can entail. Wear rugged hiking boots.

Thanks, though, for referencing this realistic overview of just how hard this really is.

[Unbroken1]

To everyone that has responded here: I appreciate knowing that I am not the only person here who identifies with this "tendency" (a helpful way to remind myself that it is not an embedded personality trait, but a learned adaptation to my environment) to feel like I am or have fallen short over the years of trying to find a way out of the hellish purgatory that CPTSD survivors live in.

Since my own path in life started with two very dysfunctional and immature parents, who both likely had undiagnosed personality disorders, I was also constantly being compared to others and shown in mostly passive-aggressive and subtle ways that I continued to fail to meet the unrealistic standards that were set for me. This led to my perfectionist style and academic over-achievement, but underneath that facade, I always felt I could never measure up and didn't deserve my accomplishments. My father, in particular, would mail me newspaper clippings or magazine articles that implied I wasn't measuring up. Never mind the fact that after they both passed away, I discovered my parents' school records, which showed me that they barely were able to keep up passing grades during high school and college. Their hypocrisy was and is still mind-blowing, and to this day, hypocritical behavior in others is enough to trigger me into shame and rage.

Enter Impostor Syndrome, which has made me feel not worthy and prevented me from stepping up to opportunities because I don't feel worthy and the despair shuts me down from even trying, or sabotaging myself. Shame ensues when I compare myself to others with my education and experience, who I feel have attained financial success or status which I do not have. I will turn 65 in a few months. Imagine what it feels like to restart your life at this age after discovering why you've been running a (metaphorical) marathon with a broken leg against emotionally and mentally healthy competitors for decades!

Since my divorce from my malignant covert/communal uNPD wife seven years ago, I fell into chronic cannabis use which I am now into cessation for the third time and at six weeks out, I think this time it will stick. I try to practice self-compassion and understand that the 24/7 indulgence was a desperate attempt to escape the emotional agony and confusion of being thrown out like a piece of trash after a 23-year relationship with someone who revealed herself as a true phony and fake empath, who had all the compassion and understanding in the world for everyone - except for me. Now that the fog is clearing, my obsessive reading and research about both narcissistic abuse and CPTSD are finally starting to provide some relief after decades of being treated through CBT for low-grade depression and anxiety.

Anyway, I have found another link that I got a lot of wisdom out of, and which seems to be related to what my original post here was about. Hope this is helpful to everyone else as well. Thanks for all the support. I hope you get as much out of this as I have and it sheds some light on your own experience if it resonates.

https://www.anniewright.com/the-playing-field-wasnt-level-to-begin-with-on-childhood-trauma-and-the-fruitless-comparison-game/

[Kizzie]

Sorry I missed approving this image Unbroken, lots going on - Kizzie