 Welcome, my name is Richard Granan. I run a website called SpartanLifeCoach.com. What I predominantly do is I help people to overcome trauma, particularly childhood trauma and abusive relationships that would typically be with somebody who would be defined as narcissistic or having borderline personality disorder. The first thing I want to do with you guys that is necessary is I need to share something with you and the thing I'm going to share with you takes about 10 minutes to get through and it will make all of you smarter than 90% of psychotherapists and councillors out there. And I can give it to you inside of 12 minutes. The purpose of this talk is to help men avoid and escape and recover from abusive relationships with women who are toxic, with women who probably would vector in for the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder. But before we get into that, I need to share with you something from psychology that is not very well known, not very well understood and is a very underused concept. And it's a concept that I believe if people were using it more frequently, we would have a lot of people stuck in therapy or needing therapy. And it's the concept of, it's called CPTSD. CPTSD. Now, when you think about PTSD because of movies, mass media, you'll think usually of combat veterans or people who've been through a single incident. PTSD usually is thought of as being singular. It's a singular event that you can recall visually, auditorily and kinesthetically. So if I say to you, what did you fucking eat for breakfast this morning? You'll remember shoving stuff in your face and you'll remember the sounds around you, the flavour of it and how you feel and who you were talking to at that time. So you will have recall of the singular event. Similarly, if you got shot by a sniper or you were beaten up in a nightclub or you were the target of a con, you'll remember the singular event that made you feel a certain way. You'll all be familiar with the concept of flashbacks typically spoken of either as something that somebody who has PTSD would experience or somebody who's taken psychedelics experiences. Have any of you had psychedelic flashbacks? Right. It's intense, right? Because the psychedelic experience is so intense, it lays down neural pathways that are thick and strong from a singular incident. The only other thing that can do that is intense pain or intense pleasure. The only other thing that can do it, which is why right before the session we were talking about psychedelics being used to resolve trauma. It's the only thing that can affect the neuroplasticity of the brain to the extent that these neural pathways can be burnt out, potentially, potentially. So, classic PTSD, singular event, you have recall and you have flashbacks that are visual, auditory, kinesthetic. You remember what you saw when it happened, you remember what you heard, you remember how you felt. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I think discovered in 1991 by a psychiatrist called Judith Herman. She was working both with combat veterans or had worked with combat veterans and she'd worked with people who had grown up having survived extensive childhood trauma and she saw the overlap in the symptoms and she put forward a hypothesis called complex post-traumatic stress disorder. In complex post-traumatic stress, it is never a singular event. It is a series of events over time, like being a political prisoner who's being tortured daily or a child stuck in an abusive family unit. It has the same impact on the system, on the biology, on the brain, on the hormonal system and on the HPA axis. Complex post-traumatic stress is harder to treat because it is harder to see, it's typically thought. So it's actually a series of events and it needs to have another element to it where there is no escape. The client must have felt trapped, there's no escape. There is no recall or little recall necessary for it to be CPTSD and the flashbacks are not visual and auditory and kinesthetic. The flashbacks are purely emotional. So you're experiencing memories through the emotions. Weird idea, but it happens. Visual auditory kinesthetic flashback, I hear a loud noise and I remember how it felt when my father hit me round the head. X equals Y. CPTSD, nothing happens or something vague happens or I'm standing up here and I'm talking to a crowd of people and for a moment I go into an emotional state of triggered by the fact that I'm outnumbered. I'm under the light, I'm being judged, I'm being watched. Instant response of toxic shame, guilt. We were laughing and joking yesterday about Anthony introducing me and then skipping over his words every time he mentioned his abusive relationship. It is a joke, but he actually was going into an emotional flashback. I can see it, I've been doing this with clients for years and I can see it on people's faces when they're flashbacking. An emotional flashback can be so intense that it shuts down the whole system. Here's another way of thinking about it because when I was first learning about this was one of the times my first time was going to America and my first time at a shooting range and we were playing with, because in America they just say what do you want, here's a basket and then you put your guns in the basket you put your ammo in the basket and they go there's the range. It's not like England, I mean people would be giving you a full 40-minute lecture before they even let you look at the pistol with your naked eyes and they just sent us on, they said go over there, try not to hit anyone. We were like okay, me and my brother-in-law and he's originally from Texas, he's never fired a gun before so we're loading the guns up, shaking hands like that going I think it goes in here. And we had a .357, which is a very very powerful pistol with a lot of kick, I ended up with a bruised palm the next day from it and we had a combat shotgun. This PTSD being singular would be like what happens when you fire the .357 at the target. It's quite easy to hit the target with .357 because if you cock the hammer back there's less pull on the trigger. It's only a tiny little pull so you become more accurate. So we were hitting the head. Dink, dink, dink, three or four little holes. My brother-in-law was a bit of a nutcase. He picked up the combat shotgun and he fired six shells inside about five seconds, his first time firing the thing. There were so many scattered pieces of trauma in the target that it split in half and fell. Scattered pieces of tiny bits of trauma that a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a councillor would otherwise be compelled to pick out one by one. Very, very difficult. Emotional flashbacks are memories. They're not emotions in the authentic sense. So I pay you a compliment, I give you a gift and you feel happy, that's an authentic emotion. I pay you a compliment and I give you a gift and you feel shamed and you become enraged, that's an emotional flashback. That's what happens with people with borderline personality disorder. Many of you have experienced this. I gave my ex-girlfriend a gift that she told me she wanted and she became enraged. Why? It's a confusing experience. It's the emotional flashbacks that count. In terms of psychology and understanding the human mind, we have to talk in terms of complex post-traumatic stress and emotional flashbacks. You all get the difference between the two. So, the only way to move forward in terms of mental health and whatever it is you want to do, and this goes through every topic we've discussed, you've got to understand what it is to be emotionally regulated as opposed to being riddled with emotional flashbacks. Complex PTSD and PTSD are always co-morbid. They always cross. This is my hypothesis, this is not the published literature, but based on what I've seen, it's something as somebody with pure PTSD who doesn't have CPTSD and vice versa. People who come to me with CPTSD, you have to deal with their PTSD as well. Whatever the issue is, you've got to look in terms of trauma because guess what? All human beings are traumatised because life on earth is traumatic. From birth to death, it's a series of traumas. You would do well to study this topic in your own time. Today, I'm going to teach you how to avoid getting into a relationship that is with somebody who has a cluster B disorder altogether, how to recognise it and how to evade it. If you do get into one, how to escape it and if you have escaped, how to recover. How can you detect abusive personality disorders in people? One of the things that you need to do is you need to get past your own emotional flashbacks. What do I mean by this? Whether it's pickup or whatever it is that we're talking about, when you are out there and you're making yourself exposed, you're being vulnerable, you're letting somebody know that you like them, most of you are going into emotional flashbacks. I've heard pickup artists talk to you about that theoretical situation and watched you in the crowd go into emotional flashbacks because you're scared of it, because it's a terrifying experience. Why is it a terrifying experience? I've thought about this for a while because I'm terrified of it too, but it's disproportionate. What's the disproportionate terror of approaching somebody or letting somebody know that you like them? I've got an idea. Now available exclusively at 21 University. The all-news CPTSC Masterclass by Richard Granton. This is the world's most advanced educational course on healing from complex trauma as a man. Learn more at the link below or visit 21university.com.