If your life feels empty and lonely, despite the fact that you do all the things that are supposed to fill up your life, you might be a “covert avoider.”
You might have a good career, you’re friendly, you’re interesting, there are people in your life -- but if you feel like nothing is connecting it’s all superficial and not giving you happiness -- It’s time to ask yourself if you’re secretly avoiding your own life.
Avoidance is really normal for people who had trauma when they were kids. If that’s you, you may have learned to look OK on the outside -- being cheerful, appropriate, functioning well enough. But you probably also learned to protect your inner state by avoiding any kind of situation that might trigger you -- things like rejection, criticism, and abandonment.
Those things can make a person with CPTSD feel destroyed. But if you go through life protecting yourself, that destroys you too. Allowing yourself to get triggered puts you at risk for falling apart, but too much self-protection hollows you out, and robs you of the experience of real love, purpose, and the needed connections with other people. What can you do?
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