Key Takeaways: Megan and Elle Arters talk about their struggles and strategies when it came to making friendships and nourishing relationships after coming out of their abusive relationships. Megan and Elle also discuss the power of groups and what kind of people are good confidants when it comes to sharing traumatized part of oneself. Notable Quotes: "I was hyper vigilant and paranoid for every new person, [and] every old person, [I was] like [to] anybody in my circle, like are you trustworthy? Are you safe?...it really does so much damage to your relationship with everyone." — Elle Arters "[Something] that I did was offering maybe 1% of my life to somebody to see how they handled that 1%, and if they proved trustworthy, I felt like I could offer 3%. But again, not flooding anybody with my trauma life..." — Megan Owen "But as I've had to walk stuff in the last 15 years, it expands my capacity for their story, for what they're going through, for what they might need, you know, different things like that." — Elle Arters "...we had lost our belongings. We had lost our homes. We had lost our children. We had lost our friends and our family and churches and we were in it together. We were comrades." — Megan Owen Resources: Mountain City Christian Counseling: mountaincitychristiancounseling.com To look into Crisis Support Groups: HERE If you are interested in the Spiritual Processing Groups, please reach out to admin@mountaincitychristiancounseling.com (0:03) MEGAN: This is Pretty Psych, the podcast where we discuss and deconstruct the impact of Evangelical Christianity and cultural phenomena on the psyche, the deep and sometimes uncharted territory of the mind. We venture into raw, rough, and sometimes triggering moments, but we know that through this what we will find will be pretty fascinating, amazing, and pretty intelligent. My name is Megan Owen.I'm a pastoral trauma counselor, and I have spent decades studying the science of human behavior. I draw parallels between therapy and connection to God, self, and others. I love what I do, and I will walk hand in hand with you through the fire to help you find healing and rest. Most importantly, I want to bring you home to yourself. (1:12) MEGAN: Hi, friends. Megan Owen here from Mountain City Christian Counseling, and I have Elle Arters with me for our podcast Pretty Psych. Elle, I am so grateful to have you today. (1:23) ELLE: Thank you. I am very excited to be here. (1:26) MEGAN: Elle and I have known each other for 15 years. We are very good friends. She is an amazing advocate and coach, and she works with Mountain City Christian Counseling now. So great with web design and all of the tech things that I can't do, and we've worked together before, and I'm probably saying all of that wrong, Elle, but I'm really grateful that you are working with us again. (1:49) ELLE: Yep, that was perfect. Thank you. I'm excited to be back here with you, too. (1:54) MEGAN: Okay. Well, we thought we would talk about friendships after abuse. This is something that I think Elle and I both struggled with 15 years ago trying to navigate how to create and maintain friendships when you have just come out of an abusive situation and you do have complex trauma and are struggling with the 5F responses, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and fold, and everybody is so different, and there aren't any books out there on how to create and maintain friendships after abuse, right? (2:28) ELLE: Exactly. Exactly. (2:30) MEGAN: So we thought we would start by talking about how easy it is to cocoon and pull in after you've left an abusive situation. A lot of us suffered from post-separation abuse. Everything felt scary. We felt like emotional burn victims. Everything felt very raw, and that's normal for CPTSD, and we still need community, and so how do we bring that together? Isolation seems very peaceful for a while, but then after a while, we can sort of get weird, right? I know I get weird. Isolation will make me a very weird version of myself, and so we do need to have each other. We struggle with abandonment wounds if we have CPTSD, and we tend to do one of two things, which are very extreme. We can either try to lock others down to help heal us, or we can do the door slam, which that was sort of my choice of coping was the INFJ door slam, so we have to find somewhere in the middle, right? (3:46) ELLE: Yeah, exactly. I can completely relate. (3:50) MEGAN: I know. Somehow, we didn't slam the door on each other. I'm not sure how that happened, but right, so it's not our fault that we have CPTSD, and we can take responsibility for the symptoms and any obsessiveness that we might struggle with at the same time. (4:09) ELLE: Yeah, exactly. I was thinking when I was kind of reflecting back myself in preparation for our dialogue today, and I think we probably chatted about this when we got together last month too, but how, like you said, we're wired for community. It's a critical piece in our ability to thrive, in our ability to heal, and yet the challenge, of course, is for so many of us, we also had our community betray us, so our relationship with community in general has been shattered. Our relationship with ourself has been shattered. Our relationship often with God has been shattered, so everything is flipped upside down. Everything's kind of disconnected, and yeah, we do all kinds of different, wild, weird, understandable. Of course, that's a hard place to navigate, and yet, like you said, we are desperate. We still need community, and we need friendship, so how do we do that through these different stages too? When I reflect back from almost 15 years ago when my life exploded and trauma started, how I related to friends and community in that stage was one version of crazy, and then as I continued to heal, or not heal, but as I continued on that journey, and then these different stages, my relationship with community looked different, and still difficult, and still, I don't know, it's just a challenge is really all I'm trying to say. (5:50) MEGAN: You're saying it well. (5:51) ELLE: Yeah, it keeps presenting all these unique challenges, and so yeah, that's why I was so excited, really, that you wanted to chat about this on the podcast, though, because like so many things, I launched down this path so blindly, and that included, like I was not prepared for how my relationship with community and friendships would change, would evolve, how difficult it would be, and like you said, I didn't have any books on that, or I didn't have resources to kind of help guide me, or even just prepare me for that kind of massive shift, so I love that we're talking about this. I'm confident it'll help others, and for anybody listening who can relate, you know, like it's not you. You're not alone. This is such a normal piece in walking trauma and post-trauma. (6:46) MEGAN: Yes, well, let's start there then, with that transition. So before our lives imploded, to borrow your term, our friendships might have been based on church involvement maybe, or what we thought healthy friendships looked like, or they might have been more transactional if you were in more of a legalistic place. That was our understanding of relationships. We didn't really have this sense, I think, at least I didn't have this sense of, okay, I'm going to be loved no matter what happens. I felt that I had to perform all the time. That was where I was at the time, and so if we think of that sort of before implosion and after implosion, BI, before implosion, we then realized, I think both, I don't mean to speak for you, but we sort of went through this together, and that's a lot of how we connected. We realized that we were right. We wouldn't be loved no matter what we did. We felt that, and that was devastating for me. I didn't know how to start over at the time. So isolation for me felt a lot safer, and it worked because I'm introverted, and I know you are too, and so we probably did something similar, but at the same time, like something you just said, we desperately need to be seen during those times, and we're terrified to be seen during those times, and we need some contact. We need some friction for our social skills and to be able to grow, but groups were terrifying at that time. (8:44) ELLE: Yeah, exactly. Again, I guess when I reflect back, there's so many different stages, but going all the way back to the beginning for me, yeah, when my world exploded, that included, and part of the catalyst was a betrayal by friends and close friends that were in my community, and then I had some friends who remained who were steadfast and loyal and beyond grateful for that, and then I had, of course, kind of the other extreme of friends who felt like they needed to take different sides, and anyway, I think betrayal is probably the best way to explain it, and so yeah, then I remember that first year, in fact, feeling so paranoid. That was like another, I don't know what the right word is, like just another outcome, I guess, that I wasn't anticipating. (9:25) ELLE: I was hyper vigilant and paranoid for every new person, but every old person, like anybody in my circle, like are you trustworthy? Are you safe? Is everything I'm going to say, is it going to be used against me? Is it going to be literally given to other people who would intentionally and cheerfully weaponize it? And this is what I mean, like it really does so much damage to your relationship with everyone. There was that early season where I felt so hyper independent and distrusting of so many people, which is a really unhealthy but understandable outcome, I guess, of trauma. (10:12) MEGAN: Absolutely, and that's a CPTSD symptom, is that hypervigilance, and I wasn't like that before, but then after going through that betrayal, right, I would panic over an email. Everything felt raw. That's that sort of emotional burn victim
