How to Understand Your PTSD Vigilant Shadow Structure

Content Warning / Educational Disclaimer: This article post contains sensitive topics and reflects Open College UK Limited’s opinions for informational purposes only.

Do you suffer from PTSD and related?

Are you recovering?

Have things improved?

The one thing you do is keep connecting with people wrong and have a high vigilance about staying away from engagement with negative people that could flare you up, step on your toes, make you angry and trigger you.

You spend more time avoiding people like this.

You have this intensely alert antenna, satellite dish running all the time. Monitoring and observing, tones of voice. You may even start picking up hidden meanings within what people are saying. And sometimes you don’t know if it’s real or just imagined. You can’t tell the difference, but you’re in what’s called survival mode, because this state of vigilance keeps you safe but is no longer necessary to run the soldier within but continues ready for the war. When there is none.

Does this sound like you?

Even when driving, you’re always looking in the mirror to see the behaviour of that tailgater. Someone’s coming too close. Did they do that on purpose? Are they doing it on purpose? Or what did that person mean when they said that? Or are they laughing at me? Are they talking about me? Or do they know something about me? Does this sound like you?

What I’m describing is very common, especially with people with PTSD or close and it is a deeply ingrained form of hyper vigilance, specifically a nervous system adaption commonly known as stuck in survival mode. And yes, you can relax and yes you can chill out, but every time you’re out in public or where potential risk and danger lurks, someone could say the wrong thing, someone could do the wrong thing, even the wrong look.

You’re highly in tune with all these things. But what you might not be aware of is the difference between just a just a look and a wrong look. You’re only seeing a wrong look. You can’t tell the difference between a wrong look and just a look. Maybe you can’t even see there is a difference, but there is and that can be applied with many things you may suffer, so again does this sound like you?

When you meet other people, especially those you don’t know, you may be guarded, so you don’t fall into a conflict or argument. Or maybe you’re ready for it and you’ll give as good as you get, or tenfold even. You start picking things up from other people and you don’t know if you’re psychic or paranoid. You can’t tell the difference as this vigilance can be explosive.

It sends itself throughout your whole nervous system and your everyday social interactions, especially when meeting new people, as you’re always guarded and the last thing you want is another fisty cuffs.

But now, your vigilant of the potential consequences of a bad occurrence and maybe you’re taking responsibility now in turning your life around, but still, you struggle with this dynamic, powerful, complex character and personality you have. You know you have a strong ego as well. And you know you could be dangerous, but you won’t hurt anyone. Maybe in self-defence, but even that’s too much!

You pick things up all the time from others. And maybe you can’t tell the difference between something that was said innocently and something that was said on the sly or on the snide subtle to hurt or offend you or to get you going, wind you up, you’ll either know what I’m saying or you won’t. Chances are you will, because you’re reading this!

What’s happening when you meet people and you pick things up. You are detecting multiple unconscious processes operating and synchronising between two people at the same time!

Shadow Work Strategy

If you find yourself intimately affected or influenced by another’s negative state or behaviour or the way they talk to you, ask yourself immediately before you react to them, what is it in me that recognises this?

Because other people are NOT like this with this person. So, ask yourself what part of my own shadow is vibrating in sympathy with this person’s issue, mannerisms, tone of voice or smart-ass way?

This may help you as education is important. So here is the starting point for you to learn about your visualisation.

Here’s what’s happening.

Multiple systems operating at once.

Firstly, the conscious layer logic, reason, words and surface behaviour.

Secondly is the pre-conscious layer which is about tone of speech, body language and habits.

Thirdly the emotional layer, which is also called the limbic system. You might want to check that out further. And this includes threat detection, attraction, fear and anger.

Fourthly, implicit memory layer which includes your past experiences, trauma imprints and memory.

And finally. The autonomic nervous system which is raw fight or flight and includes freeze responses! The non thinking part!

These all run together simultaneously to some extent and can overload the system. They don’t run in neat stacks and they can flood your mind depending on the seriousness of your PTSD and the setting you are in. Multiple unconscious processes which synchronise between two people when they meet, all at the same time.

The Core Mechanism – What’s Happening!

1. Limbic Resonance!

Two people’s nervous systems are syncing emotionally together.

One person’s anxiety triggers the other persons anxiety.

One person’s calm, this then settles the other person.

This is fast, automatic and below the thinking level process.

2. Projective Identification!

This is the big one at work!

A person carries an amount of unresolved emotions (paranoia, anger or shame) and they unconsciously project it outwards onto the other without knowing!

The other person feels it and then starts acting it out!

Person A feels threatened and then behaves subtly defensive!

Person B picks that up and then becomes defensive back too!

Now both peeps think the other is or has got the damn problem!

That’s the bubbling, ticking over deep layer connection surfacing at work!

3. Subconscious Pattern Matching!

The mind is constantly scanning it surroundings!

Have I seen this, such and such before?

Is this safe, how’s it looks?

If these two people A & B share similar unresolved patterns:

Bullying history!

Rejection issues!

Control issues!

They lock onto each other instantly and like super glue, fast!

That’s why the conflict between the two escalates very fast or attraction to another feels instant and subsequently reactions to each other feel disproportionate!

You could call this lot at work ‘Layers’ insight!

So, this bit in a nutshell.

Human interactions are not just conscious to conscious like you think it is, (you think you are seeing the whole picture) then it is a simultaneous exchange across multiple unconscious systems. Operating systems all working at the same time. And when unresolved emotional troubled patterns in one person starts to match those in the other, YOU, then a rapid feedback loop starts to form beneath the surface or beneath both persons awareness.

And this loop can drive many things as it operates outside of your conscious awareness, control. This is the thing it drives, attraction, conflict, emotional intensity and always takes dominance or control over the surface conversation like little nudges to shift and change the surface conversation to introduce these new aspects which were detected by both your antennas, which are running at a deeper level or within a deeper layer.

Reasons why we can’t see it working!

People who have reduced their reactivity through certain kinds of therapy or inner training or meditation practice have a increased observation skill with how interference works and they have also reduced identification with their own emotional lifts, so if you take care of these, then you will see it all at work in others really well without engaging. Others can’t see it because they are too close to it all. It’s operating actively within you. In other words, you’re too close to see it as you mind is flooded by it all, you become it in an instant.

Those people that train or have done inner work have developed perceptual space and their ability to see and disengage from all of this is phenomenal. Their natural development or skills go through the roof. You would not be able to comprehend what they actually see!

So instead of being inside the reactions that arise, certain people can see the trigger or triggers and not be pulled into it. They can see the responses and they can see the escalation in real time. Most people are already arguing and defending themselves willy nilly before they even know what even happened, but some people can see the ignition switch because they have stepped outside of it. They’re not part of it anymore.

PTSD / Vigilance in public or social settings!

Your nervous system is tuned to detect micro-threats all the time! And that includes subtle emotional signals in others! So, you pick up on these deep layer interactions faster than average compared to others.

Simply put you can read nervous systems and not just surface behaviours but you don’t understand any more than observing them!

In a nutshell

What appears on the surface in the conscious between two people, is the final expression of a much deeper process taking place deeper down, beneath the words and the behaviour that you can see and read. This is the unresolved, undealt with emotional patterns that are constantly scanning, reacting and matching and looking for threats and danger, unresolved material that comes off experiences that have been experienced in your life need to be returned to and dealt with, because they operate independently in a petitioned off way, often called shadows, so when two people meet the patterns can align.

To keep it simple, when one subconscious piece of material meets another like for like, they can create powerful loops of attraction or conflict that feel instant and intense and surge, the surface conscious interaction is to react, so with trained awareness it becomes possible to step outside of these loops, and not by controlling others, you can then stand comfortably in the flames but not engage, as it were, but no longer feed the unconscious loop or pattern which arise within yourself until you return to the unresolved conflicts and material that generates this other stuff that you can’t see. And it is stuff, it’s as simple as that!

There are many names to describe the same thing. Psychology calls these subconscious programmes unresolved conflicts, unresolved beliefs, shadows. And whichever way you do it, they have to be returned to, to be healed, to be corrected because it is this material outside of your conscious awareness and your conscious control that is setting the place alight within your vigilance and awareness structure. It’s keeping you in survival flight or fight mode, a readiness to react all the time. Completely braced as if something’s going to happen. And it never really does. But sometimes it does or could or because you unconsciously made it happen. And this is where confirmation bias comes into its own!

You have to do the shadow work, the inner healing work to get better!

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