Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

Most importantly, they model how disappointments with intimates can be repaired. A key way they do this is to easily forgive their children for normal mistakes and shortcomings.

Growing up in a safe and loving enough family naturally enhances the child’s capacity to notice and enjoy the many gifts that life also brings. He learns that there is enough good in life to significantly outweigh its necessary losses and travails.

In the traumatizing family however, there is little or nothing that is good enough and hence little for which to be grateful.

Unfortunately, years of this habituates the child into only seeing herself, life and others in a negative light.

Most of the physiological damage of extended trauma occurs because we are forced to spend so much time in hyper-arousal – stuck in fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode.

Particularly potent help also comes from the grieving work of reclaiming the ability to cry self-compassionately and to express anger self-protectively.

Both processes can release armoring, promote embodiment, improve sleep, decrease hyperarousal and encourage deeper and more rhythmic breathing.

Another especially helpful somatic practice is stretching. Regular systematic stretching of the body’s major muscle groups can help you to reduce the armoring that occurs when your 4F response is chronically triggered. This results from the fact that 4F activation tightens and contracts your body in anticipation of the need to fight back, flee, get small to escape notice, or rev up to launch into people-pleasing activity.

A startle response is the sudden full body-flinching that survivors experience at loud noises or unanticipated physical contact.

I agree with John Bradshaw who says that almost everyone who grows up in a dysfunctional family has an eating disorder. This is a key factor in the digestive track problems that are a common symptom of Cptsd.

These are understandable but simplistic versions of the salvation fantasy, and are typically pursued at the exclusion of working on more core issues of recovering.

Many therapists see Cptsd as an attachment disorder. This means that as a child the survivor grew up without a safe adult to healthily bond with. As bears repeating, Cptsd almost always has emotional neglect at its core. A key outcome of this is that the child has no one in his formative years who models the relational skills that are necessary to create intimacy.

A child who grows up with no reliable human source of love, support and protection typically falls into a great deal of social unease. He “naturally” becomes reluctant to seek support from anyone, and he is forced to adopt self-sufficiency as a survival strategy.

Concurrently, I learned that real intimacy correlated with the amount I shared my vulnerabilities. As I increasingly practiced emotional authenticity, the glacier of my lifelong loneliness began to melt.

More and more research suggests that our ability to metabolize painful emotional states is enhanced by communicating with a safe enough other person.

I have worked with numerous clients who made very little progress in their recovery while they maintained contact with the toxic parent[s]. For this reason, such clients usually require a parentdectomy to progress.

Self-compassion is the domicile of recovery, and self-protection is its foundation.

The most essential task of self-mothering is building a deeply felt sense that we are lovable and deserve to be loved.

Self-mothering is a resolute refusal to indulge in self-hatred and self-abandonment. It proceeds from the realization that self-punishment is counterproductive. It is enhanced by the understanding that patience and self-encouragement are more effective than self-judgment and self-rejection in achieving recovery.

When the recoveree consistently welcomes his inner child in every aspect of his being, the child feels increasingly safe and becomes more and more alive and self-expressive. As he experiences his adult self consistently rising to his defense, he will feel safe enough to begin accessing his innate vitality, playfulness, curiosity, and spontaneity.

I conceptualize reparenting by committee as a circle of friends that has varying layers and levels of intimacy. The inner circle of my reparenting committee includes my five closest friends.

Recovering is therefore enhanced on every level by safe human help. Once again however, survivors with especially harsh betrayal histories may need to do a great deal of work on other levels before they are ready to risk the vulnerability of opening to relational help.

In advanced recovery, self-help and relational-help blend in an all important Tao. A Tao is a yin/yang combination of opposite and complementary forces.

The Tao of relational recovery involves balancing healthy independence with healthy dependence on others.

Effective recovery work leads to an ongoing reduction of emotional flashbacks.

An alternative way of describing this decrease in overreacting is that you have a good balance between the polar opposites of fight and fawn. As this becomes increasingly realized, you vacillate healthily between asserting your own needs and compromising with the needs of others.

This involves working through fear by grieving our loss of safety in the world.

At this level, we also learn to work through our toxic shame by grieving the loss of our self-esteem.

Once the critic is reduced enough that you can notice increasing periods of your brain being user-friendly, impulses to help and care for yourself naturally begin to arise.

Moreover as recovering progresses, and especially as the critic shrinks, the desire to help yourself- to care for yourself - becomes more spontaneous. This is especially true when we mindfully do things for ourselves in a spirit of loving-kindness.

Recovery involves learning to handle unpredictable shifts in our inner emotional weather. Perhaps the ultimate dimension of this is what I call the Surviving ←→ Thriving continuum.

And if the flashback is especially intense, Thanatos may start knocking down the door. Thanatos is the death urge described by Freud and in a flashback it corresponds with the suicidal ideation we looked at in chapter 1.

Once again, it is important to repeat that this feeling-state is a flashback to the worst times in childhood when our will to live was so compromised. As mindfulness improves we can recognize suicidal ideation as evidence of a flashback and begin to rescue ourselves with the chapter 8 flashback management steps.

I believe regressions are sometimes a call from our psyche to address important developmental arrests. In this case, it is the need to learn unrelenting self-acceptance during a period of extended difficulty. It is also the need to develop a staunch and unyielding sense of self-protection.

As bears repeating, all human beings are existentially challenged to handle disappointing shifts out of thriving into surviving. We survivors however have greater difficulties handling these transitions because we were abandoned for so long at the surviving end of the continuum. Yet as our recovery progresses, we can learn to become increasingly self-supportive in times of being stuck in survival.