The PTSD Symptoms Nobody Talks About

PTSD symptoms don’t always look like flashbacks—these overlooked trauma responses can affect nearly every part of life.

What if some of the things you criticize yourself for are actually trauma responses that once helped you survive?

In this episode of Hey Tabi, licensed trauma therapist Tabitha Westbrook explores PTSD symptoms nobody talks about—the ones that may not resemble the cultural picture of nightmares, flashbacks, and panic attacks. Trauma can also show up as executive dysfunction, decision fatigue, anger, emotional numbness, loss of pleasure, dissociation, hyper-independence, perfectionism, over-functioning, difficulty resting, difficulty receiving good things, grief, and struggles with faith.

You’ll also discover why complex trauma can continue affecting the nervous system long after the danger has passed. Instead of simply asking, “What is wrong with me?” Tabitha invites you to get curious: What happened? What did your mind and body learn in order to survive? What might this response be trying to protect you from—and does it still serve you now?

Healing from trauma isn’t about becoming perfectly regulated or never getting activated again. It’s about developing flexibility, reconnecting with your body, rebuilding agency, practicing self-compassion, creating healthy relationships, and learning that rest, connection, pleasure, and even receiving good things can become safe again.

Resources Mentioned:

📚 The Shattered Soul by Colleen Ramser ➡️ https://amzn.to/4qp3VaC

🔴 Ready to stop pushing harder and learn to Try Softer? Join an in-person or online Try Softer group ➡️ https://thejourneyandtheprocess.com/try-softer-group/

⭐️ Join the Transformational Topics Community for more resources and conversations ➡️ https://app.helloaudio.fm/feed/6907e1ce-23d2-4296-835e-5b478472f514/signup

At The Journey and The Process we strive to help you heal. Our therapists are trauma specialists who use evidence-based tools like EMDR, Brainspotting, Somatic Experiencing, and Internal Family Systems to help you heal - mind, soul, and body. Reach out today to start your healing journey. https://thejourneyandtheprocess.com/

 This book is for every Christian woman who has been harmed sexually, whether that happened in childhood, adulthood, or even within your coercive controlling marriage, and you're longing to feel safe in your body again. We talk about the hard stuff, shame, desire, faith, and even questions like, is this sin or is this trauma?

You don't have to untangle it alone. Body & Soul, Healed & Whole is for you. Get a copy here today - https://a.co/d/8Jo3Z4V

👍 If this episode resonated with you, please like, subscribe, and share to help others who need this information!

📖 Order Body & Soul, Healed & Whole: An Invitational Guide to Healthy Sexuality After Trauma, Abuse, and Coercive Control

Wanna support Hey Tabi? Buy me a coffee here - https://buymeacoffee.com/heytabi

📩 Connect with Tabitha & The Journey and The Process:
💻 Tabitha's Website - www.tabithawestbrook.com
📲 Tabitha's Instagram - www.instagram.com/tabithathecounselor
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💻 The Journey & The Process Website - www.thejourneyandtheprocess.com

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🚨 Disclaimer: This podcast is not therapy and is intended for educational purposes only. If you're in crisis or need therapy, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

Need to know how to find a great therapist? Read this blog post here.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:40

When you hear the words post-traumatic stress disorder, what comes to mind? Well, probably nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks, maybe even somebody diving under a table when they hear a loud noise or, you know, really startling hard or whatever. And those absolutely can be and are symptoms of PTSD. But some of the symptoms that I see all the time as a trauma therapist don't actually look anything like our cultural picture of PTSD. They actually look a lot different. And today we are going to talk about them here on Hey Tabby.

PTSD Beyond The Stereotype

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Nothing is off limits here, and we are not to take two verses and call me in the morning. I'm Tabitha Westbrook, and I'm a licensed trauma therapist, but I'm not your trauma therapist. I'm an expert in domestic abuse and coercive control, and how complex trauma impacts our health and well-being. Our focus here is knowledge and healing. Trauma doesn't have to eat your lunch forever. There is hope. Now, let's get going. Sometimes those symptoms look a lot like standing in the kitchen, staring at the mess that you can't quite figure out where to start to clean, or looking at clutter and trying to figure out how do I get started with this. Or someone asks you where you want to go to dinner and you literally just cannot decide. You're like, I just don't know. Or you might have an afternoon with absolutely nothing to do. And instead of enjoying it, you are super anxious. Or maybe even somebody gives you a compliment and you immediately explain why you don't deserve it, or you just really try to push it away. You know, you might even be incredibly competent and everybody depends on you. You get a lot of things done, but you're also absolutely freaking exhausted. Maybe you snap at people over things that aren't actually that big a deal. Maybe somebody asks you, what do you like doing for fun? And you realize I don't actually know. Maybe you've wondered, what is wrong with me? Oh my gosh, what's wrong with me? So today we're really going to talk about that. We might be asking the wrong question here. We might need to expand our understanding of trauma responses because things you might be criticizing yourself for might actually make a lot of sense when we look at them in the light of trauma. So I am looking forward to diving deeper into this particular uh topic with you because it's one that we just don't seem to talk about very much, at least publicly, but we are today, right? So PTSD honestly is bigger than the stereotypes or even the things that are just in the DSM, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. PTSD isn't just about having bad memories, right? It's having traumatic experiences that affect your nervous system. It affects your ability to pay attention, your executive functioning, your relationships, even your attachment system or the way that you relate to others. It affects your ability to recognize what's happening in your own body, your sleep, your energy, your sexuality, your spirituality, like your sense of who you are. It touches every single area. And when we're talking about complex trauma,

Executive Dysfunction And Clutter

SPEAKER_00 4:13

so things that happened repeatedly over time, oftentimes in a relationship, we aren't just talking about this like one terrible thing, like a car accident that happened in the past. We're talking about what your brain and body had to learn and had to adapt to in order to survive what was happening to you. So here's something that I want you to keep in mind as we go through this whole episode today. A trauma response can make complete sense and still not be helpful, right? So we can understand how we got here and also that we want to change it and we don't want to maybe continue to respond. So, in that way, anyway. So what would be a good coping mechanism for you today, right? So, especially if you're out of the traumatic situation, you're out of a destructive relationship, then what do you want to do today so that you can cope a little bit better, right? So we don't have to hold on to things, even though they worked for us in the past, we can grow going forward. The problem for us sometimes is that that danger, that you know, relationship, it's gone. But our body and mind haven't quite gotten the memo yet. So we want to help it get the memo, but we're gonna talk about different aspects that are affected. So, first let's start with executive dysfunction. People don't often associate this one with trauma unless they do a lot of trauma work or have been in therapy. But basically, executive function is the set of mental processes that help us organize ourselves, get things done. They help us plan, start tasks, switch between tasks, remembering what the heck we were doing to begin with, and managing multiple demands. And trauma can totally jack up these abilities. You know, it can look like walking into a room and thinking, why am I here? Look, that also is getting older. Sometimes we do that when we are getting older and we're like, why did I walk into the kitchen? I don't remember why I walked into the kitchen. But it also can look like that when our executive dysfunction is a little jacked up. It can look like starting a relatively simple task and then feeling completely overwhelmed by it. Like, what am I doing here? What's happening? Or thinking, I know what I need to do. Why can't I just do it? Oh my gosh. Why is this so hard? Sometimes it even shows up as a cluttered environment. A couple of years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who's also a therapist, and she is a minimalist, and she was working on a book at the time related to this topic. And listening to her talk about clutter through this particular lens was absolutely eye-opening for me. I had never thought about clutter as something that could intersect with trauma, but it makes so much sense. I mean, think about how many executive functions are involved in dealing with clutter. You have to decide what matters, what doesn't matter, what stays, what goes, where something belongs, what needs to happen first, right? And if your cognitive resources are already being consumed by our chronic threat response, the emotional regulation stuff, intrusive memories, poor sleep, the things that we often hear about with PTSD, or just trying to simply survive, obviously, something is gonna have to give. We just can't do everything, even though we might think we can. So instead of like just labeling yourself as lazy, unmotivated, disorganized, irresponsible, I want to encourage you to get curious. What is happening here? One of the things that I think really can help with healing in this area is mindfulness. And this isn't because mindfulness magically makes the laundry disappear or the dishes get done. I absolutely regret to inform you that it does not actually, but mindfulness does help us practice bringing our attention into the present moment. It gives our brain these little opportunities to come out of constant threat processing over time. And then we are building new neural pathways. If you've listened to me talk about this, you know that I talk about this a lot. We are increasing our capacity to notice. Okay, I'm overwhelmed. I don't have to solve the entire house right now. What is the next thing? So it's kind of doing the next best thing. Not the next 17 best things, but the next best thing in this moment. And that can start freeing up our brain power and also giving us compassion towards self, which is such a huge thing when we are recovering from trauma. And we're gonna, you're gonna see self-compassion show up quite a bit in this episode. Another thing that we experience is decision fatigue. When somebody says to you, Where do you want to eat? and you're like, I do not care. Just pick a place. Like, I just don't care. And maybe you really don't care. Maybe you're like, whatever. But sometimes the problem is that your brain simply just cannot tolerate one more decision. And I actually had this happen. I was co-facilitating a training with a friend of mine this past week. And he asked me what I wanted for lunch. And I was like, I don't know. I will eat anything. I do not care. Because my brain cells were maxed out. We were just like, nope, I do not have any more capacity. We are just gonna have to not make a decision. Thankfully, he was gracious and decided

Mindfulness And The Next Best Thing

SPEAKER_00 9:22

for us, which was wonderful. And I'm a pretty equal opportunity eater.

Decision Fatigue After Coercive Control

SPEAKER_00 9:26

So it wasn't like he would, you know, inadvertently choose something I didn't like. But it was just the inability for me in that moment because I was at capacity to make a decision. I just couldn't do it. And for people who have experienced coercive control, this truly can go even deeper because you may have actually spent years learning that there was a correct answer. You might not have known what it was because your coercive controller didn't tell you, and oftentimes that correct answer changed because we know that they moved the goalposts. But getting it wrong had serious consequences for you. You might have been criticized or even interrogated. Your decisions might have been constantly undermined, and you were likely told either explicitly or implicitly that you could not trust yourself. So now being outside of that situation, you're technically free to make decisions, do whatever you want, but your nervous system doesn't necessarily experience that decision is free. Your nervous system's not there with you yet. So you make a choice and you immediately think, was this right? Should I change it? What if I miss something? What will everybody think? Are they gonna be mad at me? Are they going to be mad at me? So part of your healing is rebuilding trust in your own perception and judgment, trusting your gut, if you will, in the right ways. And I think there is another piece that I want to make sure we don't overlook. Maybe you need fewer decisions. Oh, I know. That's hard. That's so hard. Maybe everything doesn't have to become an exercise in optimizing your life. And I see this with clients all the time. I've done this in my own life, you know, where it's just like, maybe I just need another better productivity system. Maybe I just need to try this new thing. And maybe you don't. Maybe you don't. Maybe you actually need a whole different rhythm altogether. You know, maybe you need to learn how to try softer instead of trying harder. Because when your nervous system has spent years going harder and faster and trying to be stronger and trying to figure things out, trying harder doesn't necessarily heal you. Sometimes we have to intentionally create these places where there are fewer demands, fewer choices, less performance, and honestly more room to simply exist. And if that is something that you're like, yes, Tapha, I need that so badly. And I want to invite you to our try softer groups. We have one that will be in person in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and one that will be online. So you can be anywhere in the world. And we do these groups to help you learn how to get off of that hamster wheel and learn how to try softer in your own life. So it's not adding another checkbox, another thing you have to do, you know, another piece of overwhelm. It actually helps you disconnect from that overwhelm and, you know, have the ability to take a breath in your life. So if that's something that you're like, yes, yes, I need that. Oh my gosh, I need that. Check out the description for this episode. We'll have all the information there and you can get signed up. I definitely encourage you to do that. It's such a helpful group. All right, we're gonna talk about anger. So work with me here on that. Trauma doesn't always look like scared, right? It can, but sometimes trauma honestly looks like pissed off. It looks really mad. Your nervous system is constantly prepared for a threat, which means your threshold for activation can be much lower. And it doesn't take a lot, right? It could be somebody interrupting you, it could be somebody asking one more question, or your child makes one more noise, or someone sends the email, or scheduled a meeting that frankly should have been an email. Someone moves the thing and you just lose your tacos. For me, I talked about this a little bit on my Instagram

Anger As A Trauma Signal

SPEAKER_00 13:09

recently. I am packing to move. My house is a disaster

Try Softer And Fewer Demands

SPEAKER_00 13:13

right now, and I packed all my kitchen knives and I needed to cut a tomato. And I was trying to cut a tomato with a butter knife, and I lost it. I started to cry. I was so mad. Um, and I had to kind of get my life together and figure it out. And I ultimately ended up using a camping knife because I had some, I had mine around still. Um, that did not get packed. Uh, but it was such a hard space. It was such a tough space for me. And it was just because I was at capacity, right? My internal response and your internal response sometimes is like, why is everyone like this? Why is everything like this? Why? Right. And the intensity of your response might actually just surprise you. And then we get shame, right? Then shame comes right behind it. Why did I get so angry about that? And then we just beat ourselves up. But here's where curiosity is really, really helpful and is just such a powerful way to deal with that emotion. And for some people, honestly, you know, we hit anger first because it is a very high energy. It's a little bit more accessible sometimes. And realistically, fear might be underneath of that emotion, right? Grief may be underneath that emotion, a feeling of helplessness may be underneath of that emotion and exhaustion, right? We already talked about all the decisions and things might be underneath that emotion. You know, anger is honestly trying to tell you something is not okay, right? What is happening? Something's not okay here. And that's really important when we're talking about survivors and when they are continuing to deal with issues like post-separation or post-divorce abuse, because sometimes people are angry because of injustice, right? Injustice is continuing to happen. And so I don't want to at all pathologize an appropriate response to ongoing harm, right? That is a valid and important response. So our healing question here isn't how do I stop being angry? But it's really what is my anger telling me here? Is there grief underneath of this? Is there fear underneath of it? Exhaustion? Is there a boundary that's continually being violated or an injustice that actually needs to be named? Like I just need to name it. So I want to encourage you, anger isn't necessarily the enemy, but we want to learn how to listen to it without letting it run the whole show, right? That isn't helpful when it runs the whole show. On the opposite side, some people don't feel too much. They feel, well, they don't feel anything. They feel nothing, right? And sometimes that really can scare people. They'll tell me, I know I love my family, but I just don't really feel it. I don't feel anything. I should be excited about this thing, whatever this thing is, and I'm not. I don't get really sad anymore either. I just feel flat. So here's the thing numbness isn't the absence of a trauma response. Sometimes numbness can be the trauma response. So for some survivors, having emotions in general wasn't safe. Your emotions might have been mocked. You maybe weren't even allowed to be angry. Maybe your sadness irritated someone and their anger was really scary. And maybe fear

Numbness And Learning To Feel

SPEAKER_00 16:13

was used against you, or even scripture was weaponized to keep you from having emotions, right? Maybe the emotions were just too painful for your system to handle in that moment with everything else going on. And you're like, hey, look, I can't keep doing this, so I'm just gonna shut it down. That was a protective response for you. And we're not really good at selecting only certain emotions to numb, right? We don't get to say, I'd only like to numb grief and terror and shame, but we're gonna keep joy and excitement and affection and curiosity and pleasure, right? We're good, we're gonna do that. Just leave those. Numbing emotions numbs them all, even the ones that we want to have. So healing involves slowly learning to feel again, not forcing yourself into feeling, not ripping the emotional doors off the hinges, as it were. We give ourselves grace and self-compassion first with gentleness. Then we're curious. What might I be feeling right now? And sometimes the answer is still going to be, I don't know. I don't know. But that's okay. Curiosity itself is part of this work. You know, that is something that we learn to lean into as part of this work. We also might lose access to pleasure. And this connects directly to that symptom of not even knowing what you enjoy anymore. Somebody asks, What do you do for fun? And you think, fun? What is that? I have not met her. Your hobbies no longer interest you. Play feels stupid or frivolous, rest feels super uncomfortable. Spontaneity sounds literally terrible. Uh, there are so many people who tell me I do not like surprises when they are trauma survivors. And pleasure itself might feel completely unsafe. And that really makes sense when your nervous system spends so long prioritizing survival. Some of us have also received messages that pleasure itself

Pleasure And The Window Of Tolerance

SPEAKER_00 18:03

is suspicious. Like, what do you want from me? And, you know, we also might believe that our purpose is essentially to make everyone else's life better. Like we exist to make other people happy. Sometimes you've heard some version of God cares more about your holiness than your happiness. And look, I could do an entire episode on this, you know, and unpack that. But what I want to talk about here is what did you learn about pleasure? Was enjoyment safe? Was rest even allowed? Did your wants and desires even matter? Because trauma recovery isn't about becoming less miserable, right? Healing also involves increasing our capacity for pleasure, our capacity for connection, our capacity for curiosity, for beauty, for joy, and for play. And I totally love play and trauma work. If you've ever been around me, you know this. It gives us room to expand. It helps widen our capacity for experience, which sometimes is known as our window of tolerance. And healing isn't just learning how to tolerate painful things, it's learning how to be fully present for good things. Also, we might think about dissociation in relationship to PTSD, but we're going to talk about it a little more deeply. Sometimes people hear that word and they imagine something a bit more dramatic or some dramatic presentation of it. But dissociation can actually be really subtle. So you're in a conversation and you suddenly realize, I have no idea what this person has been saying, right? Even when you were trying to pay attention. Or you drive somewhere and barely remember that drive. I accidentally drove myself to a whole other state once because I was just super checked out. There was a lot going on. And I was like, why am I being welcomed to Virginia? When I am

Dissociation And Gentle Presence

SPEAKER_00 19:46

not supposed to be in Virginia, I was supposed to be in North Carolina. It was very confusing. You feel foggy, you feel far away. Maybe you feel like you're even outside your own body, kind of just watching your life happen. Or you suddenly realize you have mentally been gone for the last few minutes and you're like, I don't know where I'm at. What the heck happened? Like all of us as humans are going to have moments of being on autopilot, um, driving a familiar route, you know, kind of doing it out of muscle memory and you know, all of that stuff. And that doesn't mean that you're dissociating, but persistent dissociation, particularly in response to stress or activation, is worth paying attention to. It's another way that our brains actually protect us. If I can't escape something physically, I can escape mentally, right? I can just shut that down a bit. And here again, mindfulness practice can be really, really helpful in working toward healing in this. We gently practice staying present. And I want you to notice the word gently. We are not white knuckling ourselves into embodiment. First of all, that does not work. We're increasing our capacity over time. So I'm here, I'm in this room, I can feel my feet, I know what year it is, I know what's happening right now. Little by little, we learn that we can stay present even when we are activated. All right. This is one that gets praised a

Hyperindependence And Interdependence

SPEAKER_00 22:40

lot, but also can be a big time symptom of trauma, hyperindependence. I've got it, I'll handle it. It's easier if I do it myself. I don't need anybody. And sometimes, like, there is an element there of competence, like I can actually do it. And sometimes it's like a little bit more than that. Sometimes I don't need anyone is basically armor or protection for us because if I need you, if I need someone else, that creates vulnerability. And asking for help, you might get disappointed. You might get told, I don't really want to help you. Or it might feel like now I'm gonna owe them something. Depending on somebody for anything can mean that they have the power to hurt you. So you become extraordinarily capable. You solve the problem, you carry the load, everybody comes to you because you're the person that can handle it. And you also are completely exhausted. Healing does not mean becoming helpless. What it really means is developing enough relational safety that dependence and independence aren't your only option. It doesn't become bifurcated or you know, like black and white thinking. We learn interdependence. I can carry some things, you can carry some things, and sometimes I can let you help me without believing that that help gives you ownership of me or that you're gonna resent me for needing help. It doesn't mean any of those things. And so those are things that. That you know, we can grow in. And it feels weird, right? It it I call it edge work. And it's where we kind of get to the edge of where we're comfortable and we go over the edge a little bit and kind of like push those edges a little bit. Like that is one of the ways that we do that. And we allow ourselves to have the experience of being different, right? Experiencing ourselves differently when someone does help us and then doesn't resent us actually helps us grow in that capacity. But that does mean we have to ask for help first. That's a lot. That's hard. So this actually brings us then into perfectionism. And I am a recovering perfectionist. I honestly probably could go to a 12-step group for this. Let's be real. Because trauma doesn't always create like a visible dysfunction. Sometimes it creates astonishing competence. You work harder, you anticipate everybody's needs, you don't make mistakes, you stay useful, you become the reliable person. Nobody has to worry about you because oh, you've got it. But here's the question: what happens inside of you when you aren't performing? Can you make a mistake without emotionally beating the crap out of yourself? Can you disappoint somebody and then survive that disappointment? Can you turn in something that's good enough instead of perfect? Like

Perfectionism And The Fear Of Rest

SPEAKER_00 25:30

I can feel my own heart palpitating because when I was in grad school, man, whoa, that was hard. Can you rest before everything is done? And this, oh my gosh, I hear this weaponized in faith spaces so much, you know, um, work before play. And that is true a lot of the time, but there are times for healthy rest when things are not done. And you need to do that. We are finite people. Healing here gives you the freedom to mess up. And again, I can feel my own body reacting to this because this is something I still struggle with. And I know that really can sound horrifying because aren't we supposed to do things with excellence? Well, yes, but excellence and perfectionism are not the same thing. You're gonna make mistakes. I'm gonna make mistakes. The healing question here is how do I treat myself when I do make a mistake? Can I give myself grace? Can I sit with a discomfort? Can I make a repair if one is needed? And then, and this is like super important. Can I stop apologizing? Like, you do not have to apologize for breathing, right? Can I make repair and move on instead of apologizing to this person for the next 7,000 years? Like when you can do that, that is definitely growth and it takes time. And perfectionism's best friend, it's difficulty resting. You finally sit down and immediately you remember six things that you need to do, probably 26 things if I'm being real. You're watching Netflix or whatever you watch while mentally writing tomorrow's to-do list or actually physically writing it. You go on vacation and you don't really relax until like day four, if you relax at all. You feel guilty when you're not producing something. I see this so often. I didn't get enough done. I wasn't as productive as I needed to be, fill in the blank. All of that stuff are things that I hear in my office when I'm working with a client. Rest can feel very vulnerable when your nervous system is accustomed to chaos and to hypervigilance. You can be physically still while your nervous system is running laps. It's the hamster wheel inside of your head. And that's why just relax, chill out, calm down is beyond useless for someone who's healing from trauma. Like just stop it, is not good therapy. The issue here isn't that they don't understand the concept of sitting on the couch. Their nervous system may not yet get allowed to stop, right? That is something that again takes time and experiencing yourself differently to heal and giving yourself a ton of grace and self-compassion. Okay, now there's this one. Sometimes trauma makes it really difficult to receive what is good. Somebody compliments you and you immediately deflect. Someone is kind and you wonder what they want. A relationship is healthy and stable and it feels weird. I hear this so much. A relationship might even feel boring. You're oftentimes waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I say this all the time with trauma. It's not just that I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm also waiting for it to be thrown at me, frankly. Right. And so there's all of that going on inside. And sometimes people who are recovering from trauma actually sabotage the good things in their life because that uncertainty of goodness feels less tolerable than the familiarity of dysfunction. So if you're a people helper

Trouble Receiving Good Things

SPEAKER_00 28:48

and you're listening to this and you did not know that, then that's something to be curious about with the people that you're walking with, because I see it so frequently. Familiarity with something and safety are not the same thing. Sometimes it can feel familiar because you've experienced it repeatedly, but that does not make it healthy. And sometimes it can feel unfamiliar precisely because it is healthy and you've never done this before. So part of healing can be learning how to stay present long enough to actually discover that maybe kindness doesn't always have strings attached. Maybe calm isn't a warning. Maybe I don't have to earn this thing. Maybe something good can just simply be good. Wild. Wild, right? All right, we cannot talk about trauma without talking about grief. All trauma work is grief work. I have said it a million times. You may grieve who you were before something happened. You may grieve the childhood you should have had, the marriage you should have had. You, you know, maybe are grieving the church you thought was safe and it turned out it wasn't. You're grieving the family you wanted but didn't get, the years that you lost, opportunities that just disappeared. And sometimes there's even another layer here. You grieve who you had to become to survive. People sometimes talk about trauma recovery as though healing means eventually getting to a place where the thing doesn't bother you anymore. And I will say you do get to a place where it doesn't own you anymore. But there's still going to be sadness there, right? Some of these things should grieve us. Grief

Grief And Spiritual Trauma

SPEAKER_00 30:19

doesn't have to own us, it doesn't have to, you know, overtake us. But we can't pretend that the things that happened weren't devastating. Sometimes healing means we're finally safe enough to experience the grief that we couldn't afford to feel while we were surviving. And that process takes a long time. And for people of faith, trauma will show up for us spiritually. It just will. Maybe you can't pray. Maybe you open your Bible and feel anxious. Maybe you open up your Bible and feel rage and you want to throw it across the room. Maybe worship music that once was really comforting suddenly completely activates you and you hate it. Maybe you don't trust pastors or elders or frankly anybody in church anymore. Or walking into church just makes your body tense before you've even experienced anything, like just the environment itself throws you off. And then you feel ashamed because you're like, why isn't my faith working? And that's really important to, you know, recognize if you've experienced spiritual abuse or spiritual trauma or spiritual coercion. We need to distinguish between a trauma response that is associated with your experiences and your actual beliefs about God. And right now you might actually not know what you believe about God, depending on what happened to you. Your nervous system can associate scripture with danger if it was repeatedly weaponized against you. You know, you know that my definition of spiritual abuse is taking someone's good and right devotion to God and using it as a weapon against them. Right. So your body begins to associate church with danger if harm happened there. You can have difficulty trusting spiritual authority or spiritual leaders, and you're afraid that they might control you because you've been there, done that before. And these responses really honestly, they deserve curiosity and not condemnation. Sometimes one of the most healing things that we can do spiritually is becoming honest about what's actually happening and not trying to force it, trying to pretend, but allowing ourselves, you know, to tell the truth about our experience. And if you've been listening to the podcast, you know, I talked to my friend and fellow author, Colleen Ramser. Her book, The Shattered Soul, is such a lifeline for folks who have experienced spiritual trauma. So I would just really again commend it to you. I'll put the link in the description below. I encourage you to grab it, you know, in whatever format is best for you, but it's a fantastic book to help you walk through that. So let's bring all of this together: executive dysfunction, indecisiveness, anger, numbness, loss of pleasure, dissociation, hyperindependence, perfectionism, overfunctioning, difficulty resting, difficulty receiving good things, grief, and spiritual struggles. What if instead of looking at all these things and immediately asking yourself, what is wrong with me? Why can't I just heal? What if we started asking a different question? What happened? What did I have to learn? What did my mind learn? What did my body learn? What if this response is trying to protect me? And then what is it trying to protect me from? Is there a time this helped me survive? Does it still serve me now? And maybe even most importantly, what would safety look like for me now? Because understanding why something developed doesn't mean that we have to keep it forever. So we don't have to hold on to these things that protected us. We can honor it, we can bless it, and bless the parts of us that needed it. And then we can also decide that we don't need it in the same way anymore. Healing from trauma

Ask What Happened Not What’s Wrong

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is not becoming the person who never gets activated again. I wish it was. That would be fun. That's not how this works. It is not achieving some perfectly regulated nervous system that nothing ever bothers you in and all of that stuff. That's just not life, right? It's not failing to ever get angry again. It's not never dissociating, right? Never getting overwhelmed, never second guessing yourself. It's not any of those things. But healing is really about flexibility. It's about being able to notice, oh, I'm activated. And then knowing that you have choices about what to do with that and new skills that maybe you can employ that are better, that are more, you know, fitting with where you are today, if you will. Instead of just automatically, you know, obeying and following every protective response that your nervous system produces, you learn to reconnect with your body. You learn to develop self-compassion. You build healthy relationships with people who respect your boundaries. You recover your agency and autonomy and your choice. You learn how to rest, you learn how to play, you learn how to experience pleasure without immediately bracing for what comes next. You're not looking for that shoe to be thrown at you. You learn that connection doesn't require abandoning yourself. And for people for who faith is important, healing can also include integrating your spiritual life and the rest of you instead of spiritually bypassing, you know, what your mind and body are experiencing. So we want to incorporate our whole self in this healing process. And we become what is called integrated, right? So all of these things then work together and we have an integrated system. So what I would like for you to take away from this episode, trauma symptoms often make way more sense when we stop

Healing As Flexibility And Choice

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asking, you know, only what they're doing or what their discomfort is and start asking, what are they trying to do for us? Like, what is it trying to do for me? And maybe perfectionism kept you from getting criticized, or hyperindependence kept you from being disappointed or left alone, or maybe numbness kept you from being overwhelmed, or anger gave you access to power when you felt powerless. Maybe dissociation gave you somewhere to go when physically leaving wasn't possible. Those responses weren't random. You survived by adapting, and healing is getting to discover which adaptations you still need and which ones you can finally put down or change or do less of or whatever. And this process takes time. This is always hard for folks. It's a tough space to know that it takes time to heal. Um, but it does, and that process is good. Like we don't always have to just look at the outcome. We can delight also in the process at times, right? The messy middle is where change happens. If you recognize yourself in this episode, that doesn't automatically mean that you will be diagnosed with PTSD. But if you've experienced some trauma, you may have some trauma responses. There are a lot of reasons we might experience some of these things that we talked about today. But hopefully this gives you some language. Maybe it gives you some questions to bring into your own therapy. Maybe it gives you a little bit more curiosity about yourself instead of immediately kicking your own butt and judging yourself and all of those things. And I just think that's a much better place to begin if we're trying to figure these things out and heal. If this episode was helpful for you and gave you language for something that you've been experiencing, please take a minute to like it, subscribe, follow our podcast either on YouTube or on your favorite platform, and please leave a rating or review wherever you're listening. Those things feel super small, but they really do help other people find the show. And it really, you know, hopefully will help people who are searching and don't yet have language and know where to start with their own healing journey. And if what stood out to you today was how exhausting it is to keep pushing harder, to keep performing, to overfunction, and to try to hold everything together, I do want to invite you again to join one of our Tri Softer groups. Try Softer is about learning a different rhythm. It is

Next Steps And Ways To Get Support

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one that pays attention to your body, your limits, your nervous system, what you actually need instead of automatically demanding more for yourself. As I said, we've got a group meeting in person in our Wake Forest North Carolina office. And we have a group online that you can join from anywhere on earth as long as you have Wi-Fi. Check out the information in the description for dates, times, all of that good stuff, a registration link. And if your body has been telling you that trying harder isn't working anymore, maybe it's time for you to actually try softer. Thank you so much for being here with me on Hey Tabby. And I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks for joining me for today's episode of Hey Tabby. If you're looking for a resource that I mentioned in the show and you want to check out the show notes, head on over to tabithawestbrook.com forward slash hey tabby. That's H E Y T A B I, and you can grab it there. Look forward to seeing you next time.