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I was deeply envious of this gorgeous buffet of familial love that I had never experienced or even witnessed before.
If I am a bit repetitive at times about issues like shrinking the critic and grieving the losses of childhood, it is my attempt to find different ways to emphasize the great importance of engaging these themes of recovery work over and over again. If you find yourself lost and not sure of how to get back onto the map, these themes will always be key portals for reentry.
First, the good news about Cptsd. It is a learned set of responses, and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks. This means that it is environmentally, not genetically, caused.
It is not inscribed in your DNA. It is a disorder caused by nurture [or rather the lack of it] not nature.
Traumatizing abuse and abandonment can occur on verbal, emotional, spiritual, and/or physical levels.
When abuse or neglect is severe enough, any one category of it can cause the child to develop Cptsd. This is true even in the case of emotional neglect if both parents collude in it,
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.
Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions to the overwhelming feeling-states of being an abused/abandoned child. These feeling states can include overwhelming fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief and depression. They also include unnecessary triggering of our fight/flight instincts.
Toxic shame can obliterate your self-esteem in the blink of an eye.
The abandonment mélange is the fear and toxic shame that surrounds and interacts with the abandonment depression. The abandonment depression itself is the deadened feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that afflicts traumatized children.
Passive suicidality is far more common with the Cptsd survivors who I have known, and it ranges from wishing you were dead to fantasizing about ways to end your life. When lost in suicidal ideation, the survivor may even pray to be delivered from this life, or fantasize about being taken by some calamitous act of fate.
Further confusion also arises in the case of ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder], as well as obsessive/compulsive disorder, both of which are sometimes more accurately described as fixated flight responses to trauma [see the 4F’s below]. This is also true of ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] and some depressive and dissociative disorders which similarly can more accurately be described as fixated freeze responses to trauma.
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.
Earlier, I mentioned the fight/flight response that is an innate automatic response to danger in all human beings. A more complete and accurate description of this instinct is the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. The complex nervous system wiring of this response allows a person in danger to react in four different ways.
A fight response is triggered when a person suddenly responds aggressively to something threatening. A flight response is triggered when a person responds to a perceived threat by fleeing, or symbolically, by launching into hyperactivity. A freeze response is triggered when a person, realizing resistance is futile, gives up, numbs out into dissociation and/or collapses as if accepting the inevitability of being hurt. A fawn response is triggered when a person responds to threat by trying to be pleasing or helpful in order to appease and forestall an attacker.
When contempt replaces the milk of human kindness at an early age, the child feels humiliated and overwhelmed. Too helpless to protest or even understand the unfairness of being abused, the child eventually becomes convinced that she is defective and fatally flawed. Frequently she comes to believe that she deserves her parents’ persecution.
Carol remained symbolically enthralled to the family by getting ensnared with narcissistic people who were just as abusive and neglectful as her parents. This well known psychological phenomenon is called repetition compulsion or reenactment, and trauma survivors are extremely susceptible to
Finally, it is also important to note that the scapegoat role does not fall exclusively on the flight type as it did with Carol. It can be bestowed on anyone of the 4F types depending on the given family. The scapegoating role can also shift over time from one person to another and each parent or sibling may choose a different scapegoat.
Healing from Complex PTSD is, above all, complex.
Thankfully ongoing recovery work helped remedy this resentment. It taught me to practice self-care in a spirit of giving to a child who needed and really deserved to be helped.
I find it helpful to approach developmental arrests from the viewpoint of novelist David Mitchell’s quip that “…fire is the sun unwinding itself out of the wood”. Similarly, effective recovery is unwinding the natural potential you were born with out of your unconscious. This is your innate potential which may be, as yet, unrealized because of your childhood trauma.
An especially tragic developmental arrest that afflicts many survivors is the loss of their will power and self-motivation. Many dysfunctional parents react destructively to their child’s budding sense of initiative. If this occurs throughout his childhood, the survivor may feel lost and purposeless in his life. He may drift through his whole life rudderless and without a motor. Moreover, even when he manages to identify a goal of his own choosing, he may struggle to follow through with extended and concentrated effort. Remedying this developmental arrest is essential because many new
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The ability to invoke willpower seems to be allied to your ability to healthily express your anger.
Cognitive recovery work aims to make your brain user friendly. It focuses on recognizing and eliminating the destructive thoughts and thinking processes you were indoctrinated with in childhood.
This work then requires us to build a fierce allegiance to ourselves. Such loyalty strengthens us for the cognitive work of freeing our brains from being conditioned to attack so many normal parts of our selves.
Perseverating on finding a formula to win over her parents, the child eventually embraces perfectionism as a strategy to make her parents less dangerous and more engaging. Her one hope is that if she becomes smart, helpful, pretty, and flawless enough, her parents will finally care for her.
Sadly, continued failure at winning their regard forces her to conclude that she is fatally flawed. She is loveless not because of her mistakes, but because she is a mistake. She can only see what is wrong with or missing in her. Anything she does, says, thinks, imagines or feels has the potential to spiral her down into a depressed abyss of fear and toxic shame. Her superego fledges into a full-blown, trauma-inducing critic. Self-criticism, then, runs non-stop in a desperate attempt to avoid rejection-inducing mistakes. Drasticizing becomes obsessive to help the child foresee and avoid
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In psychology, the term ego represents what we typically mean when we use terms like my “self” or my identity. The healthy ego is the user friendly manager of the psyche.
They do this by shaming or intimidating you whenever you have a natural impulse to have sympathy for yourself, or stand up for yourself. The instinct to care for yourself and to protect yourself against unfairness is then forced to become dormant.
All too often, your decisions are based on the fear of getting in trouble or getting abandoned, rather than on the principles of having meaningful and equitable interactions with the world.
In early recovery, the psychoeducation piece of cognitive work typically comes from the wisdom of others: teachers, writers, friends and therapists who are more informed on this subject than we are.
Psychologically speaking, mindfulness is taking undistracted time to become fully aware of your thoughts and feelings so that you can have more choice in how you respond to them.
Mindfulness is a perspective that weds your capacity for self-observation with your instinct of self-compassion. It is therefore your ability to observe yourself from an objective and self-accepting viewpoint. It is a key function of a healthily developed ego and is sometimes described as the observing ego or the witnessing self.
Mindfulness is a perspective of benign curiosity about all of your inner experience.
With enough practice, mindfulness eventually awakens your fighting spirit to resist the abusive refrains from your childhood, and to replace them with thoughts that are self-supportive.
The survivor, who is seeking a healthy relationship with his emotional being, will strive to accept the existential fact that the human feeling nature is often contradictory and frequently vacillates between opposite polarities of feeling experiences. It is quite normal for feelings to change unpredictably along continuums that stretch between a variety of emotional polarities. As such, it is especially human and healthy to have shifts of mood between such extremes as happy and sad, enthused and depressed, loving and angry, trusting and suspicious, brave and afraid, and forgiving and blaming.
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For just as without night there is no day, without work there is no play, without hunger there is no satiation, without fear there is no courage, without tears there is no joy, and without anger, there is no real love.
Thus, while it may be fairly easy to like yourself when feelings of love or happiness or serenity are present, deeper psychological health is seen only when you can maintain a posture of self-love and self-respect in the times of emotional hurt that accompany life’s inevitable contingencies of loss, loneliness, confusion, uncontrollable unfairness, and accidental mistake.
Daniel Goleman defines emotional intelligence as our ability to successfully recognize and manage our own feelings and to healthily respond to the feelings of others.
Just as common is the insidious, passive-aggressive assault on emoting which is seen in the parent who shuns her child for expressing his feelings. This is seen in the emotionally abandoning parent who sequesters the child in a timeout for crying, or routinely retreats from the crying child into her room.
Emotional abuse is also almost always also accompanied by emotional abandonment, which can most simply be described as a relentless lack of parental warmth and love.
The rejecting responses of our parents to our emotional expression alienate us from our feelings.
He explains this as involving a process where the child’s emotional expression [his first language of self-expression] is so assaulted with disgust that any emotional experience immediately devolves into toxic shame.
Grieving is the key process for reconnecting with our repressed emotional intelligence. Grieving reconnects us with our full complement of feelings. Grieving is necessary to help us release and work through our pain about the terrible losses of our childhoods. These losses are like deaths of parts of our selves, and grieving can often initiate their rebirth.
The inner critic is sometimes so hostile to grieving that shrinking the critic may need to be your first recovery priority. Until the critic is sufficiently tamed, grieving can actually make flashbacks worse, rather than perform the restorative processes it alone can initiate.
A key aspect of the abandonment depression in Cptsd is the lack of a sense of belonging to humanity, life, anyone or anything.
A numinous experience is a powerful moving feeling of well being accompanied by a sense that there is a positive, benign force behind the universe, as well as within yourself.
When developing children receive “good enough parenting”, they feel that life is a gift even though it typically comes with difficult and painful experiences. The term good enough parenting derives from the work of renowned adult and child psychologist, D.W. Winnicott, who coined the term “good enough mothering” to describe his observation that children do not need parents to be perfect.
When I apply the concept of “good enough” to people, I generally mean that a person is essentially good hearted, tries to be fair, and meets his or her commitments a large portion of the time.
Good enough parents provide generous amounts of support, protection and comforting.
