Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

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.

If you are stuck viewing yourself as worthless, defective, or despicable, you are probably in an emotional flashback.

Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.

Parents who routinely ignore or turn their backs on a child’s calls for attention, connection or help, abandon their child to unmanageable amounts of fear, and the child eventually gives up and succumbs to depressed, death-like feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

Trauma occurs when attack or abandonment triggers a fight/flight response so intensely that the person cannot turn it off once the threat is over. He becomes stuck in an adrenalized state. His sympathetic nervous system is locked “on” and he cannot toggle into the relaxation function of the parasympathetic nervous system.

narcissistic [fight], obsessive/compulsive [flight], dissociative [freeze] or codependent [fawn]

they remain locked in these patterns in adulthood when they no longer need to rely so heavily on one primary response pattern.