**C-PTSD: From Resentment to Self-Advocacy In Relationships — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/cptsd-resentment-self-advocacy-relationships/

Heidi Priebe explains how complex PTSD and early relational wounding make it hard to identify and voice needs in relationships, and offers steps toward self-advocacy.

## Key Takeaways

- Complex PTSD and early attachment wounding can make it hard to know which needs are yours to meet and which are interpersonal.
- Shame-bound emotions lead to repression and hypervigilance, which distort how you perceive your visibility to others.
- Resentment often grows from unspoken expectations; clear, explicit communication is a remedy.
- Building self-advocacy starts with recognizing the size of your needs and developing self-regulation skills.

## What the video covers

- Early relational wounding often means caregivers responded to a child's needs with misattunement, rejection, or shame.
- Emotions that drew negative responses become shame-bound, leading people to repress feelings and believe they are crazy or irrational.
- Emotional inhibition can extend to positive emotions like joy, excitement, or attraction, not just anger or sadness.
- People with complex PTSD often feel an exaggerated sense that others can read their minds and emotions.
- This hypervigilance can cause people to overestimate how visible their feelings are, when others may actually find them hard to read.
- Unspoken expectations can build into resentment, as people punish partners for failing to respond to emotions they never clearly expressed.
- Those with complex PTSD may have a much larger than average circle of needs, including survival and practical needs, which makes self-advocacy harder.
- Educating yourself about complex PTSD and attachment wounding can validate your experience and clarify your needs.
- Distinguish between needs that partners can reasonably meet and needs that require self-regulation or other sources of support.
- State needs and expectations explicitly, and make appreciation explicit too, to strengthen connection.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction to Complex PTSD and Relationships
2. 02:50 How Early Misattunement Creates Shame-Bound Emotions
3. 05:30 Emotional Inhibition and Hypervigilance
4. 08:10 Overestimating Visibility and Resulting Resentment
5. 10:50 Learning Self-Regulation and Practicing Skills
6. 13:30 Expanding Your Circle of Needs
7. 16:40 Differentiating Needs and Asking for Help
8. 20:30 Communicating Needs, Expectations, and Appreciation
9. 24:10 Closing Remarks

Answers

## Questions about this video

Why do people with complex PTSD often feel that others can read their emotions?

The video explains that early experiences of severe reactions to expressed emotions lead to hypervigilance and a feeling of being emotionally exposed. This creates a sense that others can tell what they feel, even when those others may actually see very little.

How can shame-bound emotions lead to resentment in relationships?

Because the person believes their feelings are loud and obvious, they may expect partners to respond without being told. When partners don't respond to unexpressed needs, the person can grow resentful, even though the partner may never have known what was needed.

What does Heidi Priebe recommend as a first step toward self-advocacy?

She recommends educating yourself about complex PTSD, attachment wounding, and early trauma to validate your experience. From there, she suggests acknowledging that your circle of needs may be larger than average and working to state needs and expectations explicitly.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today on this channel we're going to be talking about the construct of complex PTSD and why it can make it difficult to

00:14

Speaker A

advocate for yourself inside of personal relationships now this is likely to apply to anybody who struggles not just with complex PTSD but any sort of early relational wounding that makes it difficult to parse apart what's my role inside of a relationship which of my

00:33

Speaker A

needs am I responsible for fulfilling versus which of my needs are interpersonal ones and how do I make the negotiations that are necessary to keep my relationships healthy while making sure that everybody's needs are fulfilled so what we're going to go over

00:49

Speaker A

today is why having complex PTSD or toxic shame or attachment wounding makes it so difficult to identify what our interpersonal needs are as well as how we can start moving towards a better understanding of what we need and how to

01:05

Speaker A

communicate it with the people who are close to us so to start off we're going to talk about how this problem develops specifically through the lens of those of us who have early relational wounding that lead us susceptible to having a lot

01:18

Speaker A

of toxic shame so we start out as children cleanly expressing our needs this is something that comes natural to all of us when we are very young our only possible chance at survival when we are babies is expressing our needs to

01:34

Speaker A

our caregivers and hoping that they are both competent enough and compassionate enough to respond to them sensitively unfortunately what often happens if you have cptsd or other forms of early developmental wounding is that instead of getting that sensitive attuned

01:51

Speaker A

response when you express a need you get a Mis attuned response so what this means is that you are trying to express something you need and your caregiver is either not understanding what you need so they are giving you the wrong

02:04

Speaker A

response or they are ignoring or rejecting your need particularly if your needs are emotional and your caregiver has some sort of Shame around responding to emotional needs that they have internalized hence when you express them they're unable to respond sensitively

02:22

Speaker A

what this can also lead to and this is something we've talked about at length in other videos which I will link in the description of this one is having your emotions become shame bound so now whenever you start feeling whatever

02:34

Speaker A

emotion it is that your caregiver generally responds negatively to you start to process that both in your mind and your automatic body as this emotion is wrong I ought not to express it but I also ought not feel it so let's say

02:51

Speaker A

every time you experience distress and you show it to your caregiver they tell you you're being pathetic or you need to suck it up or something of the like you might start to believe okay that feeling is just crazy and irrational it does not

03:04

Speaker A

have a basis in reality airo in order to make sure it doesn't get in the way in other areas of my life my best possible shot is learning to repress this need and if it makes it into my conscious

03:15

Speaker A

awareness to remind myself this is crazy and irrational and I ought not to express it now this leads to two problems one is that you get really good at emotional inhibition so anytime you're experiencing a strong feeling that once led to rejection by the people

03:33

Speaker A

closest to you you learn to keep that feeling inside and not say it to the people around you so you may have learned not to express anger and sadness but you may also have learned not to express too much joy or too much

03:46

Speaker A

attraction or too much excitement because maybe those things as well as the more stereotypical negative emotions are the ones that you got shamed for at some point in your life so now you're walking around with all of these

03:59

Speaker A

feelings that are providing you with real important pieces of information but you've learned to tell yourself these feelings are crazy and I need to make sure that nobody else is aware that I have them lest I get rejected again but

04:15

Speaker A

also you may have developed a specific type of paranoia that I've noticed is very common among people with complex PTSD which is the feeling that other people can kind of read your mind and tell what you are feeling and anytime

04:30

Speaker A

you're feeling something super strongly now this is not a paranoid delusion right so it's not that you necessarily truly believe people can read your mind but it's more this feeling of almost feeling naked anytime a really strong feeling arises for you and having this

04:47

Speaker A

fear like oh my God other people can tell that I'm feeling this thing and the reason you feel this paranoia and this intense desire to make sure that your feelings are kept clamped down where no one can see or hear them is because in

05:01

Speaker A

your early life you likely had a larger than average cost of mistake when it came to expressing feelings that would disregulated your caregivers so if every time you showed even a little bit of anger you would get met with a really

05:16

Speaker A

extreme response from a caregiver you're going to now be extremely hypervigilant about monitoring your own thinking in your own feeling for any sign of anger and you're going to be working overtime to make sure that you're not expressing

05:30

Speaker A

it at all as opposed to let's say someone who is raised in a more secure environment who doesn't have significant shame binds around their emotions they're going to feel anger and maybe have a little bit of a conscious process

05:43

Speaker A

around how do I express this healthfully how do I not let it get in the way in some major way in my relationship but there's not going to be this overwhelming fear that letting even a little bit of it leak out is going to

05:55

Speaker A

lead to an extreme response when you have complex PTSD it's often the opposite so any emotion that was shame bound early on for you may have gotten that way because it once led to a very extreme response from your environment

06:11

Speaker A

that you were completely and totally IL equipped to handle at that time so now if you feel even a tinge of anger a tinge of sadness a tinge of lust a tinge of excitement or joy you might become

06:24

Speaker A

hypervigilant to make sure that those things are not at any cost showing to the people around you because again you're used to that very high cost of mistake making one small slip up in your emotional regulation could lead to a

06:39

Speaker A

really explosive or traumatizing response now this leads to its own very specific problem which is that when we have that hypervigilant response to our own emotional state so we're really carefully monitoring how we're thinking and feeling to make sure that none of it

06:56

Speaker A

is leaking out of us what often happens is we are over estimating how much other people are picking up on our emotional cues so I might be walking around thinking anytime I feel attraction or excitement or anger everybody can tell

07:10

Speaker A

it's written all over my face when in reality I am displaying almost nothing and it's very very hard in fact to read me because that emotional repression skill has been so cleanly honed but the problem with having that hypervigilance

07:26

Speaker A

around not expressing our emotions paired with that kind of subconscious belief that other people are always picking up on these little tiny things that we're feeling can lead to an experience of resentment in relationships because we may feel like

07:41

Speaker A

okay my emotional volume is so loud inside my own head there's no way that other people aren't picking up on it a little bit and then we can start to subconsciously punish other people for not responding to the emotions that we

07:55

Speaker A

believe they are seeing in us when in reality they may not be able able to read us at all we may seem like a totally closed book and they might have no clue what our needs are and so this

08:08

Speaker A

leads to a vastly different experience of ourselves than other people are having we see ourselves as these very emotional very intense people whereas other people may have absolutely no idea how to read us or what's going on with

08:22

Speaker A

us and this might lead to a ton of resentment and a ton of anger inside of our relationships when we feel like I am showing you how I feel 24 hours a day not realizing that other people actually

08:35

Speaker A

have no clue what we're thinking or feeling or needing from them so just to recap all of that really quickly if you grow up in an environment where you showing specific emotions leads to a Cascade of extreme responses from your

08:48

Speaker A

environment what you're likely to do is learn to inhibit your emotions while becoming hypervigilant to the times when they show up inside of your body and mind because of that hyper vigilance it might feel as though other people are as

09:03

Speaker A

aware of what you're feeling as you are when in reality you are severely instinctually inhibiting your emotional expression and other people actually have next to no clue what is going on for you so you might be walking around

09:18

Speaker A

feeling frustrated that nobody is attending to your emotional experience or nobody seems to care about all of the intense things that you're feeling when in reality you have not learned the skill SKS for showing what you're feeling because it was once not safe for

09:34

Speaker A

you to do so so to start reversing this cycle what we need to do is a learn to recognize when we are in a safe environment for emotional expression so what we're going to talk about for the rest of this video might not be a safe

09:48

Speaker A

thing to do if you are still living in the environment that you develop these responses within however if you are now living independently you have a Social Circle or one or two people who you can practice ice this with you can learn to

10:01

Speaker A

start undoing some of that patterning and getting into the more secure response pattern which brings us to the heart of this video which is learning self- advocacy in relationships so when I think about self- advocacy two things come to mind

10:15

Speaker A

immediately one is internal self- advocacy so being willing to justify and validate our own feelings and needs as real responses to our environment not crazy garbage that we made up inside of our mind and then external self- advocacy which is doing the work of

10:33

Speaker A

educating other people about what our feelings and needs are as well as what we might need from them in order to feel like our interpersonal needs are being met now this requires a high degree of self-awareness and emotional sobriety

10:48

Speaker A

and those skills in and of themselves can take a while to develop but what we're going to do today is just go over a blueprint of what it looks like to be able to practice the skill of self-

10:58

Speaker A

advocacy the the same way that someone who is raised securely attached naturally does quite frequently inside of their Intimate Relationships so what we're going to do is look kind of side to side at what a secure person processing their emotional needs looks

11:14

Speaker A

like versus what someone with complex PTSD or early wounding might look like when they're processing their needs so let's say that this circle represents a secure person's emotional and practical needs so this is everything that they currently do not have that they need in

11:29

Speaker A

order to feel relatively stable and balanced secure people are not without problems life is constantly throwing curveballs and there are constantly things that are needing to be attended to but the secure person also tends to have a fairly High awareness of what

11:46

Speaker A

their needs are so they're able to identify why they're feeling out of whack or what they're stressed out about or why they're emotionally disregulated most of the time not all of the time but most of the time and that's a

12:01

Speaker A

combination of them having good emotional literacy skills so being able to accurately name and define what's wrong for them when something's going on but also the result of them having strong interpersonal skills so there's likely quite a few people they can go to

12:15

Speaker A

for co-regulation or to bounce their problems off of who are able to give them good perspective on what it is that they need that they might be missing now contrast this to a person with complex PTSD it's likely that that Circle of what

12:32

Speaker A

your needs are is much much bigger than that of the secure persons and the reason for that is because having complex trauma by definition means that you've experienced a great deal of early wounding that has led to a great deal of

12:49

Speaker A

problems that are both practical and emotional in nature so you are highly likely at any given point in time to be dealing with a surplus of practical challenges and a surplus of emotional challenges because with those practical challenges comes emotional disregulation

13:09

Speaker A

which is the same for a secure person however the secure person has access to resources both internally and externally that help them regulate around those challenges you are less likely to have those same resources if you have complex

13:25

Speaker A

PTSD so now when you have practical problems you're likely to also become highly emotionally disregulated not necessarily have the resources to re-regulate yourself and so you're less able to deal with those practical problems and solve them which leads to

13:41

Speaker A

more emotional disregulation and so that Circle just keeps getting bigger and bigger so once again at any given point in time the true legitimate needs of someone with complex PTSD are likely to be significantly more than the average

13:57

Speaker A

secure person now what's tricky is that your awareness of what your needs are is much smaller than the average secure persons often because there's been that experience of early gaslighting or early trauma or early shame binding that has

14:16

Speaker A

made a lot of what you need inaccessible to you consciously so you might blame a lot of your problems on you just being a terrible no good person when in reality you are facing very real very legitimate problems that a secure person would also

14:34

Speaker A

feel distressed by but they would know that they could seek help in solving those problems having toxic shame often means that you fail to give your problems legitimacy you chalk them up to you being a terrible person and you

14:49

Speaker A

assume that much of what you're dealing with you don't deserve help around so your awareness of what your literal needs are is much smaller both proportion Al and literally than the secure persons and I find that a lot of

15:03

Speaker A

the time people with complex PTSD severe attachment wounding whatever it is will actually get frustrated when they see secure people asking for help or needing support in the areas that they believe they are unable or should not be asking

15:18

Speaker A

for help or seeking support in because there's this internalized worldview that you can only ask for help or you can only feel sorry for yourself or give yourself any type of compassion if your situation is so extreme that it

15:32

Speaker A

would debilitate absolutely anybody so watching other people exist in the middle of that spectrum and ask for help and seek Community Support in areas that are not necessarily in crisis mode yet can actually be highly triggering for you and you might feel contempt or

15:49

Speaker A

defensiveness when you see it happening which leads us to the last Factor here which is what you feel comfortable asking for help or support with and when I say comfortable asking for help and support I look at that as kind of a

16:02

Speaker A

three-part equation part one is feeling like support or help is available to you like it's something that it's even possible to ask for part two is knowing how to ask for help so having the skill to communicate your need and ask for

16:17

Speaker A

help in its fulfillment and then part three is giving yourself permission to do that and this is very often the hardest part for those who struggle with shame bound needs and emotions so once again again when you are securely

16:30

Speaker A

attached you're going to have your literal needs and your awareness of your needs being fairly matched and then you're also going to have a pretty big proportion of those needs being things that you're comfortable asking for help with now of course secure people can

16:45

Speaker A

struggle with asking for help as well that's not to say that this is always an easy thing but in general having the emotional regulation skills to solve most of your personal needs intuitively tends to automatically give secure people the per permission to reach out

17:00

Speaker A

and ask for help and support in the areas that they've identified they can't solve on their own and they don't see that as something that is shameful to do in fact something that secure people tend to naturally understand is that

17:13

Speaker A

other people actually like offering help and support because when you live in healthy interpersonal systems that's how people stay connected they find ways to make each other feel useful and important by exchanging practical and emotional health so as funny as it may

17:28

Speaker A

seem to you if you have a lot of that early wounding in Secure systems a lot of the time it's actually considered an act of kindness to ask someone for help or support because you're showing them that you really value what they bring to

17:40

Speaker A

your life and also creating a system where they can now come to you when they need something for those of us with complex PTSD or other forms of early wounding this is a very different story so we have that large circle of needs

17:55

Speaker A

that small circle of needs that we are consciously aware of and then the circle of things that we feel comfortable asking for help for so things that we believe help is available for that we know how to ask for and that we have

18:08

Speaker A

given ourselves permission to ask for is almost non-existent it's a very tiny Circle because if you don't grow up in that healthy interpersonal system you don't learn that giving and receiving help is part of what keeps people in

18:22

Speaker A

connection you may have learned something like asking for help gets me rejected even further or ask for help places an incredible burden on other people and now I'm responsible for burdening them which might come with an overwhelming amount of guilt and shame

18:39

Speaker A

so much so that even thinking about making that ask starts to kind of shut down the system I remember when I was doing my graduate degree and I was really really struggling with this one aspect of one of my courses I just could

18:52

Speaker A

not wrap my mind around a certain project that I was trying to do and I remember talking to my therapist about it and and him telling me well why don't you just ask your professor for some clarification or for some help and in my

19:05

Speaker A

mind that was the worst thing that I could possibly do that was the quickest way I believed to get rejected to be seen as stupid to be outcasted from the entire academic environment and my therapist looked at me and went you are

19:17

Speaker A

literally paying this school to help you you are paying them a very not insignificant amount of money because you are going there to learn your professors and Tas and academic advisers are all staffed and paid money because they play the role of helping you learn

19:35

Speaker A

it is their job to be responsive when you need help and thinking about it that way was very very foreign to me but really illuminated the fact that even in this position where I was explicitly paying a ton of tuition to get the

19:50

Speaker A

support that I needed in learning I was so hardwired to believe asking for help was the absolute worst and most burdensome thing a person could do it took me a lot of work to be able to access the resources that were blatantly

20:04

Speaker A

and explicitly available to me and this is very much not an uncommon occurrence for people who have complex PTSD whether it's an academic environment a personal environment a service you're paying for your awareness of what you are able to

20:17

Speaker A

ask for help with what it is appropriate to ask for help with and what you need help with it's likely very small relative to the average person's and the vend diagram gets a little wonky here because it's also possible that there

20:30

Speaker A

are some areas of your life where you feel totally comfortable asking for help and other areas where you feel like you would rather die than ask for help so you might be over asking for help in one area and under asking for help in

20:44

Speaker A

another so let's say you don't mind going to people to get your emotional needs met this is going to be not true at all of some people with cptsd very true of others but maybe you have no awareness of the Practical needs that

20:57

Speaker A

you have and how you could both help yourself and get help in fulfilling those so because you have all of these practical needs that are going unfilled or that you're unable to help yourself with you might have a surplus of

21:10

Speaker A

emotional needs that you are now consistently going to other people with whereas you would have way way less of those if you would actually ask for help in more practical areas or the reverse could be true maybe you are over relying

21:25

Speaker A

on people practically to help you fulfill your survival needs because you are constantly so emotionally disregulated internally and totally unable to get help with that because you believe it is completely shameful to ask for emotional help in any capacity that

21:41

Speaker A

you're not able to regulate yourself enough to solve your survival and practical needs so this is about learning to even out the score so that you're asking for the appropriate level of help in the appropriate categories so that the problems in your life are

21:55

Speaker A

actually getting solved rather than continuing to to perpetuate themselves which brings us to the final portion of this video how to self- advocate so I'm going to bring us back to that definition of self- advocacy as being able to both internally identify and

22:11

Speaker A

validate our needs and feelings as well as externally advocate for them which means teaching people what our feelings and needs are as well as how they can appropriately respond to them is this a Magic Bullet that means your

22:27

Speaker A

interpersonal needs will always be met by other people absolutely not this has to be a consensual encounter right other people have to be willing to be responsive to your needs in order for this to work so this might mean choosing

22:42

Speaker A

different relationships or different people to be in your inner circle if the people who you're currently close to don't want to take your feelings and needs seriously but first let's go through the steps of making sure that we

22:55

Speaker A

are not assuming that of people when in fact fact there's a lot of money on the table interpersonally and what I mean by that is that we may have people in our Lives who would be willing to be much more

23:08

Speaker A

responsive to and compassionate towards us than we think because we're making errors in judgment about how well other people are able to read us and understand what our needs are so step one in that process is figuring out how

23:22

Speaker A

to get that vend diagram of our needs to look more similar to a secure person's and taking that awareness Circle and trying to expand it so this is the process of kind of UNG gaslighting ourselves of failing to tell ourselves

23:39

Speaker A

that our feelings and our needs are unimportant pathetic and don't deserve to be attended to until we can believe truly believe within ourselves that we are worthwhile human beings who have a right to be healthy and have our needs

23:56

Speaker A

met both practically and emotionally it is going to be really really hard to convince anyone else that that is true in large part because we're not even going to know what our feelings and needs are if they are so shame bound and

24:10

Speaker A

so hidden from ourselves that we cannot correctly identify them we're likely going to be just asking over and over for things that are not really getting at the heart of what we need and feeling a sense of frustration and resentment

24:23

Speaker A

because we just don't know how to help ourselves the first thing that often needs to happen if you have complex PTSD is you need to admit to yourself that you have a much much larger than average circle of needs so expanding that Circle

24:40

Speaker A

of awareness if you have complex trauma you likely have debilitating toxic shame shame that gets in the way of many different areas of your life you likely have a lot of difficulty regulating your emotions you likely have a a lot of

24:59

Speaker A

practical challenges that other people have not and do not experience all of these things make your experience of Life very challenging however toxic shame is going to tell you that you do not have a challenging life you're just pathetic

25:16

Speaker A

and worse at dealing with things than other people so learning to fight back against that inner critic and stand strong in the part of yourself that knows deep down my experience of life is not just like everybody else is I do

25:32

Speaker A

have very significant challenges that other people truly do not have to the extent that I have them and that anybody experiencing this volume of both practical and emotional problems would feel equally as overwhelmed or depressed or anxious or whatever that is as I

25:52

Speaker A

currently feel is going to go a very long way towards educating yourself about which of your needs are currently going unfulfilled so just to validate some simple ones off the bat having any emotion become shame bound so any

26:07

Speaker A

feeling from anywhere on the spectrum of emotions that most people regularly experience like fear Joy attraction anger sadness anything if any of those core emotions are ones that you feel as though you cannot feel or Express without fear of severe repercussion from

26:27

Speaker A

your Environ that is an extraordinarily disregulated experience that will follow you through your entire life until you learn to integrate that feeling having even one fully shame bound emotion is going to be chronically dysregulating and it's likely to make your life and your

26:47

Speaker A

relationships feel significantly more difficult than the average persons having a lack of stability in your life a lack of a stable place to live live lack of consistent income being either unable to meet your own basic survival needs or not having people in your

27:06

Speaker A

corner who can help you if those needs are not fulfilled makes your life much more difficult than the average persons now what I'm not saying here is that having these challenges are a death sentence to your mental health or your

27:20

Speaker A

ability to thrive in the world what I'm saying is that until we recognize the magnitude of the challenges that we are up against in life it's really hard to tackle them at the magnitude that they need to be tackled so what might be

27:34

Speaker A

helpful in Step One is just educating yourself as much as humanly possible about what complex PTSD or attachment wounding or early trauma is and how it affects the average adult this is going to help you give validity to your own

27:49

Speaker A

challenges rather than just writing them off as you being a worthless pile of garbage it might also help to work with a trauma informed coach or therapist who can help give you perspective on the magnitude of the problems you're dealing

28:03

Speaker A

with and who's going to help you learn to take seriously your own problems and your own emotional responses to them and this in itself is an ongoing process for most of us that takes quite a bit of time and that is perpetually unfolding

28:17

Speaker A

as we continue to live our lives but the sooner we can get started on it the sooner we can start moving into that second step which is properly allocating which needs are ours to fulfill for ourselves versus which needs it's more

28:31

Speaker A

appropriate to ask for help with and what likely has to happen here is a ton of self-work in the areas of differentiation and enmeshment so differentiation is the process of understanding where we end and other people begin and it's likely if you have

28:48

Speaker A

cptsd or early relational wounding this is a very murky area for you and you may have a ton of beliefs about how individuals and relationships function that are very different from how the average secure relationship functions so maybe you've internalized these ideas

29:04

Speaker A

around if I do X for someone they automatically owe me why because maybe you grew up in an environment where no one could just stand in front of another person and go hey I need why can you help me out with that so you may have a

29:18

Speaker A

ton of little implicit contracts in your own mind that for other people are totally explicit so this is the process of rooting out what those expectations you have of other people are as well as noticing whether or not those are things

29:32

Speaker A

that you tend to make explicit so let's say I have this belief that everybody is totally and completely responsible for regulating and adhering to their own emotional experiences because maybe as a child that's what was true for me now

29:47

Speaker A

when I have a partner or a close friend come to me and start telling me about an emotional experience they're having I might go into some sort of freeze or Fawn response and respond to them but grow resentful of them because in my

30:00

Speaker A

mind they're breaking the golden rule of everybody deals with their own emotional problems and doesn't put them on other people in reality maybe that person grew up in a secure environment and they believe that telling you about their

30:14

Speaker A

problems and asking you for feedback is actually a sign of respect and a bid for connection because they're showing you that they value your input and also that they trust you with personal information so you might grow resentful that you

30:27

Speaker A

feel like you are chronically having to respond to this person's emotional needs while dealing with all of your own independently when in reality you never made your expectations explicit you never checked in on why the other person is sharing with you and you never let

30:42

Speaker A

them know that you expect everybody to keep their needs to themselves or the total opposite of this could be true right so maybe you were never taught self-regulation and the only way you know how to stay regulated is to

30:55

Speaker A

chronically explain your feelings and needs to other other people and have them help you understand yourself and solve your problems and you might have this secret contract inside of your head where you will do all of these favors

31:07

Speaker A

for other people and then believe that they now owe you constant on demand co-regulation anytime you are feeling out of whack and you might become really angry and resentful anytime that other person is not immediately available to help you self-regulate when you are

31:24

Speaker A

struggling but you may never have stopped to ask yourself do I have an explicit agreement from this other person that they are willing to be there to co-regulate with me on demand am I growing resentful because someone is

31:37

Speaker A

failing to live up to an obligation that they never agreed to live up to now I want to level with us all here and make it clear that there is of course a normal and by normal I mean kind of

31:50

Speaker A

secure level of interpersonal co-regulation and Attunement that's inherent to healthy relationships so the more secure we get the more we're going to aim for relationships where people are available to us relatively frequently to co-regulate especially our close Intimates so our partners or good

32:07

Speaker A

friends or chosen family members however secure relationships also mean that those people are not on call for attending to our needs 24/7 we also need to be able to self-regulate enough of the time that we can at least wait for a

32:23

Speaker A

couple hours or a day or two until that person who we want that co-regulation from is able to be truly available for us so at this stage of the process noticing where our resentments lie is going to be really important instead of

32:37

Speaker A

running away with whatever story we're telling ourselves that's keeping us feeling resentful towards another ask ourselves what is the need that I'm expecting from this other person right now and is it reasonable so if I'm feeling really grumpy one day and I'm

32:51

Speaker A

really upset that my partner isn't immediately there making me feel better I might want to ask myself is it actually my partner's job to make me feel better about every little thing that happens in my day or is a large

33:04

Speaker A

part of that my responsibility that I am neglecting because maybe I have this in meshed worldview that people are always meant to tend to each other's emotional experiences or is it the opposite am I really annoyed that my partner or my

33:20

Speaker A

close friend is needing something from me or telling me about the way they're feeling when in reality that's a very healthy and normal part of having relationships is seeking out that co-regulation from each other and often figuring all this stuff out requires

33:34

Speaker A

some help so we may need to read some books or go to some workshops or find a coach or therapist who can help us gain a more robust understanding of what secure and balanced relationships look like so this leads us to the last point

33:49

Speaker A

in the process which is explicitly informing people about what our needs and desires are from a relationship and framing them positively so that instead of this kind of lowgrade frustration that lacks a solution we're giving people conrete and actionable items they

34:07

Speaker A

can work with to make the relationship that they have with us run more smoothly so the questions to ask yourself here when you feel a sense of gnawing frustration or resentment or anger that you might tell yourself you don't

34:19

Speaker A

deserve to express is validate that feeling internally okay whether it's fair or not something is going on for me and it's getting in the way of my ability to feel connected to this other person so it's real and it's there have

34:35

Speaker A

I made this explicit so whatever I'm expecting of this other person that they're not fulfilling am I 100% sure that they know I have that need the only way to be 100% sure is to tell them very directly that you expect X Y or Z from

34:54

Speaker A

them in every other case there is absolutely plausible deniability that they do not know that need exists for you so we want to make sure when we are angry frustrated or resentful that we have made our need clear again this is

35:10

Speaker A

going to be harder than average for someone with complex PTSD to wrap their minds around because you might have that bias towards thinking that you are displaying your needs much more than you actually are next question to ask

35:24

Speaker A

yourself in this process have I made the solution to this problem explicit so have I framed it in a positive sense and by positive I don't mean like throw a bunch of toxic positivity in there what I mean is have you internally identified

35:40

Speaker A

what needs to happen in order for this problem to feel resolved and have you made that clear to the other person so instead of saying you're really pissing me off today which might feel like you're making your feelings and needs

35:52

Speaker A

explicit have you said hey when you roll your eyes at me when I share my my frustrations with you I feel really frustrated and dismissed I want to feel close to you I want to have a good connected relationship with you and in

36:07

Speaker A

order to do that I need to feel like you care about my feelings I need to feel like we are taking each other seriously I'm willing to take you seriously when you're struggling with things and I want to be there for you but I also need to

36:20

Speaker A

feel the same is true and reverse what can we do to make this work out and there may need to be a little bit of a negotiation that follows that maybe they're not available all of the time to

36:29

Speaker A

listen to every concern you have about your day but there are certain times they're able to carve out where they can feel present and responsive to you without being resentful which is likely going to stop the kind of passive

36:41

Speaker A

aggressive responses now if you have cptsd or other developmental wounding stating what you want can actually feel like an incredibly vulnerable thing because there may have been a time in your life where what you wanted was used to manipul ulate you and so you may have

36:58

Speaker A

learned I have to inhibit and keep hidden what my true wants and desires are lest I get taken advantage of this is a really sad experience to have but unfortunately in order to connect healthfully with other people we cannot

37:14

Speaker A

keep our wants hidden it will not work because our wants and desires are the things that provide healthy nutrients to the relationship and they give relationships fuel to keep driving it forward so if letting someone know how you feel about them what you want out of

37:33

Speaker A

the relationship with them feels very scary and intense to you this is likely a skill that you need to start practicing because otherwise it's going to be really hard to progress past a certain point in the relationship because your partner is not going to

37:47

Speaker A

feel valued or cared about and once again it might feel if you have this overwhelm of love and appreciation for them internally like they must just know that they must be able to read your thoughts and tell how much you care

38:02

Speaker A

about them but if you have learned to significantly inhibit what you're feeling it's possible they have absolutely no clue what is going on for you internally and might be feeling quite neglected and quite uncared for despite the abundance of feelings that

38:17

Speaker A

you are holding on to internally so this brings us to our last and final Point make sure that you are not only making your needs and expectations explain but also that you're making your appreciation explicit are you internally

38:32

Speaker A

and externally showing appreciation and thanks not only for the times when your partner got things right and was properly able and willing to address your needs but also for the ways in which they were trying to even if those

38:47

Speaker A

attempts fell short positive reinforcement is incredibly important for the health of a relationship so you want to make sure that when you are advocating for your own own needs to get met you are not only making clear what

39:00

Speaker A

those needs are and how the other person could help fulfill them but you're also being really explicit about what you appreciate that they are doing right and these two sides of the coin are going to help your relationships move a lot more

39:16

Speaker A

smoothly because now nobody's just flailing around in the dark hoping that what they're doing is going to work you're giving your partner as clear and explicit directions as you can about what needs to happen in order for you to

39:29

Speaker A

have the safety security and confidence that you need within your relationship and you're letting them know when it's working and the more we can model this behavior for other people the more it starts to become a relational Norm where

39:43

Speaker A

maybe in the past withholding and resentment and passive aggressiveness was once the relational Norm now like most things we talk about on this channel these changes are vulnerable they are risky and they take time time to implement not only for the other

39:59

Speaker A

person to accept but also for you to get comfortable with we don't become emotionally literate overnight but every time we take one step in the direction of identifying what we need phrasing it positively allowing the other person the

40:15

Speaker A

option to agree or to negotiate around that need we take one step closer to having secure explicit relationships where everybody understands what the expectations are and so we're each free to agree to or disagree with whichever Norms begin to emerge out of that

40:35

Speaker A

Dynamic and having those norms and expectations be explicit is going to save about 90% of the grief that those of us who grew up insecurely attached or with complex trauma might experience inside of relationships again if both parties are

40:53

Speaker A

willing and able to implement this type of communication all right that's all I'm going to say for today on the topic of complex PTSD and advocating for your needs inside of a relationship as always any questions comments thoughts that

41:08

Speaker A

have been coming up for you as you go through this video feel free to leave them in the comment section I'm always curious to know what you guys are thinking I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other

41:19

Speaker A

and I will see you back here again really [Music] soon oh

Topics: complex PTSD C-PTSD toxic shame attachment wounding self-advocacy emotional inhibition relationships resentment emotional regulation boundaries

Study this video

- [Flashcards from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/flashcard-maker/?from=transcript&id=89576)
- [Quiz on this video](https://sozai.app/tools/quiz-generator/?from=transcript&id=89576)
- [Crossword from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/crossword-maker/?from=transcript&id=89576)
- [Word search from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/word-search-maker/?from=transcript&id=89576)
- [Study guide from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/study-guide-maker/?from=transcript&id=89576)

Free, made by AI from this transcript. No signup.


---
This is the markdown twin of https://sozai.app/transcript/cptsd-resentment-self-advocacy-relationships/ — the same content, without the markup.
Published by SozAI (https://sozai.app). Reuse and quotation are allowed with attribution and a link back.
Machine-readable index: https://sozai.app/llms.txt · data API: https://sozai.app/api/