Beyond Codependency: Dissociation, Hyperfocus, and Trauma Bond Recovery

I’m exploring a more nuanced way to understand trauma bonds, narcissistic abuse recovery, dissociation, hyperfocus, and why some people struggle more than others to recognize, leave, and recover from abusive relationships. 

Transcript

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Hello folks, there's a few things I'm going to be talking about over the next few weeks that we're going to explore together. And I will be reading your comments and your questions in the comments section because I've come to this conclusion by reading the comments section and by doing uh coaching calls again with people, group coaching calls, and taking feedback from them and also speaking to people who work in the field like uh Darren McGee. So I'm going to be talking about an alternative way. Oh, I've got to be so careful how I talk about this. I just turned the camera on and I was like, why was I so nervous about doing this video? And then I felt really confident, and now I'm like, hang on a second, there's a minefield here. Okay. Slowly. Uh the model of saying people with who are uh the repeated targets of narcissistic have something called codependency or are dyed in the wool fawn responders. It's not wrong, but it's a bit weak and it's a bit dated. Uh there's no clinical entity called being a codependent or codependence. Nobody's ever been diagnosed with codependency. All of your clinicians know what you mean when you say it, but it's not a clinical entity. Does that mean it doesn't exist? No, nobody claimed it existed. It's a map, it's a model of talking about things. It's the same with fawn responding. Is it is CPTSD widely accepted in the ICD-10 and in the DSM? No. Do we think it exists? Yeah, probably. It's not. Just because it's not in the ICD-10 and it's not in the DSM doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It means that it may exist in the future and there may be reasons why it can't be written about just now. But that's not the controversial part. Let me tread carefully towards this minefield. I'm experiencing instant regret. So through these conversations and through uh like looking, talking to people in the community on RichardGranan.com and the conversation with Darren McGee, I'm sort of looking again and going, why do some people seem to have more of a problem with recognizing a predator, with recognizing that they're in an abusive relationship, and then with recovering from the abusive relationship, and some don't. Now I don't have peer-reviewed, thorough research standard data for this, it's anecdotal, but I have been working with people in this field for 14 years now, and I've seen patterns of behaviour that lead me to think something more is going on. Okay, so the non-controversial part of this there seems to be something called trait absorption. It's highly likely that if you are high in trait absorption, that a narcissistically or psychopathically or borderline-based, uh asymmetric, unfair, bullying, misusing, abusing type relationship would be more of an immersive experience for a person and would draw them in. So we have trait absorption, not controversial. We have a tendency towards dissociation, that's not controversial. Uh that's within the CPTSD model. Most of you here would just say, yeah, probably I have a greater tendency to dissociate than others do. That's not particularly controversial. Where it gets controversial is the third element that I want to look at here. Strictly speaking, there's four elements, but let's just keep it simple and keep it to three. So we've got absorption, you're high in trade absorption, you have a tendency to dissociate. This means you're less likely to recognize a psychological predator as a predator, you're less likely to recognise a relationship as abusive, and then when you want to leave, you will struggle to leave. I'll explain why the dissociation makes it hard for you to leave afterwards. The third thing, let's call it hyperfocus. Now, hyperfocus is a part of ADHD. ADHD is not a condition that I have a thorough understanding of, but I have had clinically qualified people tell me that I should look into the possibility that I have ADHD. Hyperfocus is non-volitional. Some people have given me feedback, and then when I looked further into it, it seems also possible that I may be on the spectrum for some element of autism spectrum disorder. Don't read into that too much. These are models, these are maps, this is where we're up to today. It's not, you know, like just don't read into it too much. But it starts to get controversial here because then I would need to be saying to people something along the lines of, look, I've observed this. There's a cohort of people who do my seminars, do my courses, do a um an intensive, and they go, thank you very much. That was great. I feel better, and I never see them again. And I never see the name. I don't have like a photographic memory or not, but I'm pretty good with names. Aeroplane. And there is a cohort of people who don't have that experience. It's not fast, it's not easy, it's not straightforward. And, and I'll come back to this when we discussed the sociation in a moment, there's a cohort of people for whom the material doesn't land. It's a small cohort, but the extent to which it doesn't land is what I would I would consider it significant. So um I don't talk neurodivergence on this channel. I don't talk neurotypical. I try not to use the term not because I'm like in some boomerish, grumpy state, and I'm like, oh, you know, these are all just fads and people are making things up like they made up dyslexia when, you know, there were naughty boys in school who didn't want to concentrate on boring books, so they made up dyslexia. I'm not saying that because I can't know that, and I've not spent, I've not done the hard yards, as the Americans say, in doing the research. I just, I just don't, I just don't know about it. So the controversial thing here, well, I maybe other people don't find it controversial. I find it a bit controversial, I'm very nervous about saying this, is there may be a cohort amongst you, and I include myself in this, who are neurodivergent, which is a bit of a bucket term. So there are neurotypical people, we assume, and they have a baseline for resilience to stress, they have a baseline for concentration, they have a baseline ability for executive function. Culture impacts it, IQ impacts it, education impacts it, but they're around the baseline. And then there's people who can't do normal life very well without it being difficult. And I think it's more likely than not that I'm in that cohort. I am not inviting you to diagnose yourself with anything. If you suspect you have ADHD or you suspect you're ASD or neurodivergent, please speak to a qualified clinician. Don't take it off some dumb YouTube video from a guy who's telling you I don't understand this properly. I do have people in my family who are diagnosed with ADHD. I do have people in my family who are diagnosed with autism through to low-functioning autism. I do have a doctor in my family who is very invested in the study of this, and she discusses it with me. And she suggested that I was neurodivergent about a year ago, and I I shrugged it off because I was like, I think that's just a model. I don't I don't agree with that. I think trauma is just trauma, and you know, this is an adaptive response. But now I I don't I don't think that, and I need to be honest with you and say that it's probably the case that if my material works very well for you, it could very well be because your issues match my issues. And if you like listening to me, I may be speaking at the pace and the tempo in a way that matches that there could even be something in the pattern of language and the thought processing that makes you go, this resonates. And I'm not saying that makes you autistic, ADHD, neurodivergent. I don't know. What I want to do is be honest about this. Can I come to a dissociation with your permission? Dissociation, uh, if somebody's highly dissociative under conditions of stress and they have a lower level of resilience and a higher threshold for overwhelm, and the response to being overwhelmed is to check out, there's three phases that people get stuck on. One, recognizing a predator as a predator. Why would dissociation stop me from recognizing a predator as a predator? Because when they become abusive, I get overwhelmed and I check out. Number two, recognizing that the relationship is abusive. It's not fair. Notice the emphasis on fairness, justice, and a hatred of hypocrisy, he said. Just a little note, it's not a diagnosis. I'm just saying, it's not fair. It's not, you know, when people get like, it's not fair. That's not what we agreed to. It it may not be ASD. It may be that you were traumatized in childhood and the way you were treated was unfair, and so you're you're you're left with a traumatic imprint against unfairness. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But it's important we notice what our patterns are, what your pattern is. Your pattern is not exactly my pattern, but it probably, it's highly probable that it's similar to my pattern, which is why the videos resonate and why the courses resonate. Number one, I can't recognize a predator because I dissociate and I'm hyperfocusing potentially, and I'm actually maybe not that great at recognizing the metacommunication of a predator, but I'm masking so well that I think I'm a really good at meta-communication because I've cognitively convinced myself through learning facial expressions and tones of voice as though they were mathematical formulas, which in human beings they are not. That was a little aside for you to just think about. No diagnosis. Number two, I don't recognize that I'm in an abusive relationship because I am high in trait absorption, I'm completely immersed in this person's story, more than a neurotypical person would be. And every time something bad happens, again, I check out, I dissociate. Step three, why are some of us struggling for years to recover from this? Absorption, dissociation, and hyperfocus. Hyper focus is a bucket term for now. Hyperfocus applies to ADHD, not autism. Autism can have, I only I only found this out myself when I looked it up 14 days ago, not claiming any expertise in this whatsoever. Please speak to people who are experts on this, not me, but just food for thought. There are special interests. The difference between a special interest in autism and a hyper focus in ADHD is volition. So the person who's a ASD spectrum volitionally chooses and with intention to put energy into a person, place, or a thing because it regulates them. It's a good way of doing emotional regulation. You know, the the clicking, the echolalia, the twitching, the repetitive stimming, it's for emotional self-regulation. So the hyper investment in an abusive relationship, you can describe it as a as a an excessive fawn response. I think it's Pete Walker's uh concept, and I think it's I think it's a great concept. It's a fantastic addition to the three F's. And I think and I think it's an observable pattern of behavior and it's a it's a meaningful structure. Uh I really like Pete Walker's work. Uh I've recommended for years now that everybody read uh CPTSD from surviving to thriving by Pete Walker. So codependency fawn response, yes, but there might be something else that's going on there that can't be necessarily therapied away. So if you're a fawn responder, we'd want to remove the fawn response, and then in situations of pressure, we'd make you more assertive without being psychopathically aggressive. If you were codependent, we would seek to do things that elevate your sovereignty and make you more independent, and we'd want the codependency away. If some of these things are traits, then we would need to recognize them and then work around them because removing them or you know eradicating them may be a fantasy. It may just be: look, I process reality a bit different to other people, I process relationships a bit different to other people. It's not that I'm a bit eccentric and quirky, it's that I don't operate at a primal foundational level the way most other people operate. It's not the end of the world. It's just, but but if it is that, we must be aware of that. Hyperfocus is non-intentional in ADHD, and it's effectively, you could you could argue it's a kind of a of a primitive trauma response. Um, I can't stand being in this reality. I'm going to escape this reality by putting all of my time and all of my attention on this one thing. As I said in another video, apparently I only just learned this last week. The dopamine set level is lower in people with ADHD. So the thing they're hyperfocusing on is probably causing a release of dopamine. So this looks, ASD and AHD, ADHD on this issue looks very, very similar. It is also a way of regulating emotional and somatic states. The point being that you may end up feeling, thinking, and acting as though that person and that relationship is more important than it is because of pre-existing traits and a pre-existing way of viewing reality, a pre-existing way of interacting with reality that might not be removable, it may only be adaptable through awareness, through putting um boundaries in place, through putting checks and balances in place. Am I getting too sucked in too quickly? Am I putting too much emotion into so on and so forth? The dissociation element of this. I did an interview with Darren McGee last night. Uh it was very good ice horse. Well, I enjoyed it. I narcissistically got a lot out of it. And we were talking about the way in which uh he was using a Carl Rogers frame, which was uh Carl Rogers posited that everybody has an authentic self and an adapted self or an ideal self that is inculcated through culture, family, tribe, church, whatever else. It's the person you need to be to not get rejected fundamentally. And then he went to positing that in a narcissistically abusive relationship, we already know that the narcissist has a false self. Thank you, Kornberg, thank you, Winnicott. But what we're not talking about is the way in which the narcissistic person applies a false self to the target, and that through time and trauma and entrainment, you become fused with that. And I think you are much more vulnerable to that process if you have this cluster of neurodivergence. That's my suggestion. I can't say it, you know, with my chest and be belligerent and bullish about it because I've not done the research, and I don't know of anybody who's even done the research to suggest this. Final thought. Have you done the Break the Trauma Bond course? Was it amazing? It's it's the course I'm most proud of because it's the course that it's the only course I have that has like a truly original concept at the heart of it. Everything else is bits of Gestalt and transactional analysis, psychoanalytic theory, bits at CBT, uh it's bits and pieces from different places that are put together and I go, I think this is probably how a solution can be created. But that's that's authentically mine. And I created this before years ago, like in 2016, I think it was. Very briefly. Did you get a lot from that course, or are you in the cohort? I think it's like, I think it's about 2% of people go, I'm doing the course and nothing is happening. So the course uh basically posits something like um the narcissist person, this is how the course was created. The narcissistic personality store is based on splitting. Splitting is a response to trauma. Everything and everyone is either all good or all bad. When you're idealized, you're all good. When you go through the uh the non-idealization phase, the de uh devaluation and de-idealization the devaluation and de-idealization phase, you're all bad. So in one, you can't do right for doing wrong, and in the other, you can't do wrong for doing right. Oh, switch them around. Let's do it around. It's that way. Now, I then suggested my intuition based on conversations with clients and based on my own experience was that what was happening is that the the target then splits themselves through dissociation, and they hold two separate memories. There's a memory of the good partner, the good breast, if you like Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theory, and then the bad partner, the bad breast. And they're split. And what creates that split is my pre-existing, I'm claiming, tendency towards dissociation. What's the trauma bond? It's that you have a bunch of uh uh good, good, compelling, immersive, significant, full of life, full of drama, full of significance and and and potency. And you store them on one hard drive in your brain, and then there's all of the experiences where they just show you they're just a very mediocre, very crappy, just nasty, superficial, grabby, greedy, but they're it's it's they're just everyday, they're just like the idiot who throws litter out of their car when they're driving because fuck it, who's gonna do anything about it? They're they're evil, but not in a drama. Oh, the Lord of evil is here. They're boring evil, you know, they're just shitty people. And what I was thinking is that there's two hard drives there, and one of them is highly magnetized and very interesting. All of the compelling experiences, I won't say good, and the other one is very boring and very non-magnetizing to me, um, because of dissociation and potentially because of the pre-existing traits. Absorption, hyperfocus, so on. So the course basically said, okay, well, the client, the target, is cycling through different self-states. We all cycle through different self-states. And the root, the person who says, I'm ruminating all the time, I can't get over this person. They're accessing the memories regularly that are compelling, that where life is drama and it's like a Brazilian telenovella every day. And it's not that they can't access, I'm not making silly claims like, oh, they lose their memory. They can remember. We can. Remember the bad stuff, but it doesn't mean much. It doesn't mean much. It's not compelling. It's not magnetic. And so, in our normal, the more frequent ego state that we're in, if we're trapped in rumination and we can't go over the relationship, we're accessing the compelling memories. Some of the things that you access are bad memories, but it's still part of the fantasy. She screamed at me and threw my phone out of the car, but that's because she's a passionate blah blah blah, you know, whatever the shared fantasy is. I genuinely actually caught her lying about this really dumb thing to not even to me, it was to her friend, that made her look slightly cooler and it was a completely unnecessary lie. And this is a goal she's known since childhood. Some something that is just not part of the narcissistic idealized image. This person is because if they're big evil with big E, that's still part of the narcissistic, they're still grandiose. If they're dull evil, little e, not even evil, evil's too strong, just shitty people, just con artists, lazy, lazy, just crummy, crummy people. I can only access that if I'm in therapy, or if I'm in a conversation with a friend, or sometimes it'll just pop up randomly. And the test to know if this has happened to you is you suddenly run across an old memory and you have absolute crystal clear clarity of what that person did and why they did it, and you're furious. You're furious. This is a memory that's a year old, dude. What are you getting angry about it for? Now, like it happened 24 months ago, mate. You want to be angry now while you're doing the dishes. What are we doing? What are we doing? It's that you can't normally access that, and if you can access it, because I'm not making the claim that you you're so dissociative you don't remember what happened, though that's happened to me, and I know it's happened to clients. You're so dissociative, some of the things that are so bad you literally don't remember, and then you ping, it comes back. But mostly you do remember. Like if I say to you, Do you remember the thing with your ex-boyfriend that you told me about last March where he did X in the country of Indonesia? And you go, Yes, but if you're in the shared fantasy uh idealized split state, you have the memory and it doesn't mean anything. You're just like, Yeah, I remember. God, what an asshole to do that to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, he is God, he's he's terrible. Yeah, what a what a you know. I told you, I think he has narcissism. You had conversations like that, and the other person might be like, oh, okay, she seems really cool with this, or he seems really cool with this. Well, maybe the therapy they've been doing works, you know, maybe therapy really does work, but they're not accessing it in the correct state. And so they it doesn't, the memory doesn't have meaning. The break the trauma bond course, before I even knew what this was, I just intuited that this would help, is for serial dissociators to put both memories in the same place and magnetize both of them so that instead of instead of remembering the split idealized version of events out of that person, you remember the whole thing. And once you've integrated the memory, you've gone from fantasy to reality and you put them all in one place. Literally, you put them in one place on a page, you write it down. Final, final thought on this. Neuroscience has shown us that uh did I say neuron science? It's neuroscience. I don't know what I just said. Neuroscience has shown us that trauma affects different parts of the brain in ways that we can physically measure, we can physically see. One of the parts of the brain that's that's uh consistently impacted by trauma, especially long-term trauma, is the hippocampus. And hippocampal volume shrinks after long-term trauma. It it atrophies. Now, as far as I know to date, we don't know exactly what the hippocampus does, but it's highly likely to be responsible for emotion and memory and the assignment of the appropriate emotion to the memory. Did you know that your memories are not just videos? They're not just like sheets of data of what happened. You, in order to remember something, you have to be able also to apply the somatic feedback you experienced at that time. I was really cold that night. I was so hungry when that happened. And the emotion, I was so angry when that happened. I was so anxious when we had that conversation. And when the hippocampus shrinks, our ability to assign emotion to memory diminishes, is one suggestion. And that means our capacity to access memories has literally shrunk. We've been dissociating for so long, probably before the relationship, the relationship pushed us further down the hole of dissociation. We got so good at it that a part of our brain begins to atrophy. The good news is. When you do exercises like the ones that presented in the Break the Trauma Bond course, and you just, like a child, you let yourself go free and you just do it. You submit to the process and you just do it. When you do exercises like the emotional literacy course, which is free, you can go to fortressmentalhealth.com, uh, Fortress Mental Health Self-Protection System on YouTube, and there's a whole free course there on how to reduce emotional flashbacks and how to develop emotional literacy. My hope with the emotional literacy exercises where people go inside and they say, How did I really feel about that? Let's take a collar wheel of emotions and apply with nuance how I really, really felt. Yes, they're honoring the self, they're honoring their emotions, and they're building a bridge with their authentic self. Or absolutely that's happening. But my hope was that it could undo some brain damage. That through practice, like your bicep is looking a little atrophied. Okay, so let's go do some chin-ups and some bicep calls. Work it, work it, work it, get the neural pathways firing again, use them daily, get them stronger so you can now safely access emotion attached to memory. Suddenly, I'm remembering better. Some suddenly I feel like I have more RAM available in my brain through doing some stupid emotional literacy exercise. How is that possible? Because it may, I'm not saying it is, but if you look at the research uh where it talks about the practice of uh concentration exercises, where the person is asking themselves how they felt or what happened and then writing it out, it does it it works so well that there's even research that suggested that when people had been through a traumatic event, if in the hours after the event, I think I'm remembering this correctly, if they were invited to play Tetris, which is a game where blocks of different colours fall and you put them in the right slot, that the sort of disassociative, uh different brainwave state of just pre of playing Tetris, the research suggested it could actually help with the recovery, or sorry, it would reduce the likelihood of the client developing post-traumatic stress. It's in the brain, it's physical. I'm gonna stop there. I have a lot to say about this. I'm gonna say it slowly without I'll try and make it digestible without overwhelming people. Look, I'm not trying to offend anybody, I'm not uh making any claim around ASD or ADHD or neurodivergence. This is, it's not new to me. I just don't like touching it. I don't like going there. Another reason for going there is the same as with BPD. You get a lot of people online who that's a major part of their identity, and they'll come and dogpile you if you say anything about their precious diagnosis. I'm not a clinician. If you think you're on the spectrum for these disorders, you should speak to a clinician. A YouTube video cannot in any way meaningfully help you die. You shouldn't be diagnosing yourself with things anyway. You should go and get a clinician to do it. That being said, I do think we're in an area where we need to explore this. Final thought. When people did the break the trauma bond course, overwhelmingly the response was very, very positive. People would be saying things like, My God, I broke the trauma bond inside of 24 hours by doing the exercise. But some people would say, I did it again and again and again. Uh it was released in 2016. There are five cases I can remember. So it's literally thousands of people have done the course, but there's five cases I can remember where they said, I did the trauma bond course and nothing happened. It didn't help me at all. And okay, I'm not stupid. I'm not, you know, sometimes psychology can be a bit naive. Occasionally, clients misrepresent the truth. And there's a possibility that all five people looked at the exercise and said, That's too stupid. That couldn't possibly be the solution to my complicated problem. I'm not doing it. I'm gonna say that I did it, but I know that if I I I know that if I did do it it wouldn't work. Maybe. Let's in good faith assume that they actually did do the work as it was described, and at the end of it, it really didn't do anything for them. Two things. Number one, you might not be a serial dissociator. And if you're not a serial dissociator, the course isn't really designed for you. And number two, again, I say this tentatively, and I'm not trying to offend anybody. If you're not a serial dissociator, it's very unlikely you're in a trauma bond. So if I've given you a pill for a virus that you don't have and you go, this didn't work, it's not the pill doesn't work, it's that you didn't have the virus in the first place. A trauma bond is not uh, I still think about my ex. My ex was an asshole, he was arrogant, he cheated on me, he lied to me, I thought he was amazing, and he really let me down. And I just can't stop thinking about him. That's that's not a trauma bond. That is uh heartbreak, and heartbreak is awful, and it could be elements of betrayal trauma if it's if it's taking a really long time to recover from. Heartbreak is awful, betrayal trauma is awful, and it's it requires specialist work to overcome, if I'm being honest. You need to be speaking to somebody who really, really knows what they're doing to overcome that. So don't you could be in a lot of pain for a long time just from heartbreak and betrayal trauma. A trauma bond, you you need to be thinking that you were essentially inside of a cult of one and that you were brainwashed, you've been entrained psychologically, physically, emotionally, neurologically to anticipate disaster. To you lived in fear, you lived in blind fear, unreasonable fear, irrational fear. The people who I know have been abused by um one of the ways I know that somebody's really experienced abuse at the hands of a pathological individual is when they talk to me and the fears that they're telling me of are not rational. They're irrational fears. Why? Because they exist inside the grandiose shared fantasy that's not based in reality. Your ex-husband can't hire the CIA to come and shoot you, or whatever, whatever the uh claim is. That's an indication that a person has been brainwashed by somebody who's truly pathological. So if you've not been entrained and brainwashed by a pathological individual inside of a cult of one, you're not in a trauma bond. That's that's not a trauma bond. You would only be in a trauma bond if you had a some you were on somewhere of a spectrum for dissociation to begin with, but then the trauma they put you through put you into massive dissociation. That course is about healing dissociation. As much as it is about we heal the the trauma bond through uh integrating the split and dissociated dissociated memories and making the dissociated memories associated again. So then you are looking at reality. If you're just in a bad relationship or a bad breakup, then it then it wouldn't work. I spoke way too long. Ladies and gents, thank you very much for your time and for your attention. I very much look forward to speaking to you again very soon. Thank you.