Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

or when the self-medicating strategies developed to soothe depression and anxiety get out of control and also require outside help.

It is a learned set of responses, and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks.

Cptsd is a more severe form of Post-traumatic stress disorder. It is delineated from this better known trauma syndrome by five of its most common and troublesome features: emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self-abandonment, a vicious inner critic and social anxiety.

What I do most vividly recall was how the yelling felt. It felt like a fierce hot wind. I felt like I was being blown away – like my insides were being blown out, as a flame on a candle is blown out.

I realized it was a flashback to the hundreds of times my mother, in full homicidal visage, blasted me with her rage into terror, shame, dissociation and helplessness.

When fear is the dominant emotion in a flashback the person feels extremely anxious, panicky or even suicidal. When despair predominates, a sense of profound numbness, paralysis and desperation to hide may occur.

Toxic shame, explored enlighteningly by John Bradshaw in Healing The Shame That Binds, obliterates a Cptsd survivor’s self-esteem with an overwhelming sense that he is loathsome, ugly, stupid, or fatally flawed. Overwhelming self-disdain is typically a flashback to the way he felt when suffering the contempt and visual skewering of his traumatizing parent. Toxic shame can also be created by constant parental neglect and rejection.

The abandonment depression itself is the deadened feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that afflicts traumatized children.

Toxic shame also inhibits us from seeking comfort and support. In a reenactment of the childhood abandonment we are flashing back to, we often isolate ourselves and helplessly surrender to an overwhelming feeling of humiliation.

that it was natural for us to wish that God or somebody or something would just put an end to it all.

By the time she was three, she had been so frequently punished for making noise while talking and playfully exploring her house, that her constant state of fear generated an ADHD-like condition in

She would busy herself from breakfast until supper, often forgetting to come in for lunch, which she thought in retrospect made life even easier for her mother, who never called her in to eat.

Too helpless to protest or even understand the unfairness of being abused, the child eventually becomes convinced that she is defective and fatally flawed.

In my opinion, however, singular approaches are unable to address all the levels of wounding that combine to cause Cptsd.

An especially tragic developmental arrest that afflicts many survivors is the loss of their will power and self-motivation.

In childhood, my own flight response got channeled into acquiring academic skills for which the outside world rewarded me.