The Happy Complex

How to start protecting your happiness when your own brain is your worst bully

For me, one of the most challenging parts about living with cPTSD is the constant battle with the bully voices in my head. The voices from toxic people in my past who trained my brain to attack itself for every little thing. 

The worst part is when those voices reach the point of attacking the things I love, the things that bring me peace. 

How do you keep those joyful parts of yourself safe when your brain just won’t stop? 

Why is This Happening?

The cause is complex, but to put it simply, those voices didn’t come out of nowhere. People in the past have demonstrated that negativity, and your brain took note. Eventually your brain also learned that to stay safe, you had to think like them, anticipating their attacks, staying on guard to avoid causing more conflict. A constant alarm going off warning about danger – that’s hypervigilance. 

In an ideal world, that alarm saying “watch out” would only go off when there are true signs of danger. A branch snapping in the dark woods. A growl from a dog. Even mindful training of dangerous tool safety, like a chef’s knife skills.

In my experience living with cPTSD, that alarm never stops because I was never taught how to feel safe. I was never allowed to simply be. So now even though my brain is trying its best to protect me, it’s actually doing the opposite. It’s disallowing peace. 

Facts First

Let’s start with the most critical question – are you truly in danger? To some, this may feel like a silly question to include, but if you’ve found yourself in an abusive situation, the answer may be yes. Prioritize your safety. 

Try to distinguish fact from perception. Instead of “they’re giving me the silent treatment because I messed up” take a step back and re-establish the simple facts instead, “they’re just in the other room, I don’t know what they’re thinking because I can’t read minds.”

As you’re identifying the facts, try to keep a balanced view. Look at everything that’s happening, not just the scary parts or just the peaceful parts – all of it. 

Separate the Parts

Once you’ve got the facts, it’s time to look inward and separate the parts of your brain. Give that angry voice a name or a shape. Give your inner child one, too. Give the different parts of you different identities so you can start to see when that anger is attacking your inner child, and introduce a protector. 

The purpose here is to try and more readily identify where your thoughts are coming from so you can respond accordingly. Is it your inner saboteur wrecking everything? Tell them to take a hike. Or maybe it’s your inner child begging for a need to be met? Answer the need. 

If this idea resonates, you may benefit from looking at the Internal Family Systems Model. It’s an approach to therapy that embraces this idea of discrete subpersonalities. It’s not the same as Disassociative Identity Disorder with entirely different personalities living in the same body, it’s simply a way of framing the different ideas in your brain. 

Practice Your Peace

Now that you have the facts and you can identify the difference between what’s attacking you and what you want to save, it’s time to make deliberate choices. 

Use the facts of the situation to make a case for how to move forward. Going back to the example, “They’re in the other room and my fear is telling me it’s my fault, but I can’t read minds so I don’t know. They were fine this morning when they brought me donuts, which was a positive sign. I’m just afraid something has changed, but I have no other signs that anything happened, only my fear. My inner child just needs love and comfort.” You can then consider options like reaching out to ask for clarity, or seeking self-soothing behaviors that resolve the needs of the inner child without requiring external validation. 

For a long time, I felt like I had to listen to everything my brain spewed out. Clearly if I was this upset about something, I should listen to my brain about that, right? Turns out no. Feelings aren’t facts. 

I realized that my brain was an over-active alarm system, screaming at anything and everything that came into my life. It didn’t matter if it was a justified fear or not. It would replay the errors of the past and anticipate the catastrophes of the future. I started to learn that the more I let that alarm system go off – the more it would continue to go off. 

I was, in effect, practicing the skill of being on high-alert all the time. 

It was robbing me of my peace, and I was proving incapable of letting peaceful, happy things stay good. I never trusted them. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy where that fear of the catastrophe was what caused the catastrophic events to happen. 

I reached a turning point when I realized I didn’t want my traumas to rob me of my joys. I figured if I was manifesting failure – why couldn’t I manifest peace instead? We truly cannot predict the future (as convenient as that would be). So instead of imagining a horrible future, why not imagine a good one, instead? Neither one may come true, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to live with the hope of a bright future instead of the constant dread of a bad one. 

It Won’t Be Easy

I’ll be honest – I’m pretty new to this practice of manifesting peace and joy instead of anxiety. I’ve had decades of practice envisioning the worst outcomes, and I’ve really honed that skill. If there was a job all about being a Negative Nancy, I’d shine. 

But I’m really new to this idea of protecting my peace. It’s not effortless. It’s not intuitive. Part of me worries that I’m just not geared for it… but I can also tell you that’s probably the internal alarm system raising a red flag about this new idea of optimism. 

So I can’t wrap this article up with a confident claim that this works. All I’ve got is that it’s been good so far. And that I really hope I can keep the peace (and that it all doesn’t bite me in the ass – whoops, there’s that alarm system again!).