One of the most useful things Iâve learned about recovering from trauma is that my decisions need to be judged according to the incomplete information that was available to me at the time.
So, say Iâm deciding whether to eat chicken at a restaurant. All evidence is that itâs a good idea. Iâm hungry for chicken, and I usually feel good after eating it.
I eat the chicken, and I get food poisoning. The resulting illness causes me to fall short of responsibilities, and creates numerous problems for me and the people who depend on me.
Trauma brain says: âThis happened because I am Bad At Making Decisions. If I had made The Right Decision and not eaten chicken, everything would have been fine.â
Recovery brain says, âAccording to the information that was available to me, the chicken was unlikely to make me sick. Eating chicken was a Good Decision with Bad Consequences. This happened to me because I had incomplete information.â
The âtrauma brainâ response makes all decisions really hard, because each decision involves the prospect of being judged by a future self that has more information.
âShould I buy the $2 mouse pad or the $3 mouse pad? If I buy the cheaper one and it doesnât work well, it will be my own fault for not buying a better quality oneâŠâ
(Then I might end up paying myself $1-per-hour to agonize over which mouse pad to buy, which is probably an ACTUAL unwise course of action.)
But if I foster the ârecovery brainâ response, I can start to trust that my future self will judge my decisions kindly.
âIf I buy the cheap mouse pad and it doesnât work, then I only gambled $2 on it. If I buy the $3 one and even it doesnât work, then Iâll have more closely guessed how much I need to pay for a mousepad of sufficient quality.â
And then later when the mousepad doesnât work: âWell, that didnât work. At least I made a decision. The outcome has given me more information about the options available to me going forward.â
(Meta level: Decisions you made prior to reading this post about how to treat yourself were probably good given the information you had access to about trauma and recovery!)
tl;dr: Bad results are not always evidence of bad decisions. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt about why you do what you do.
