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.

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, 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.

Many dysfunctional parents react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment. Contempt is extremely traumatizing to a child, and at best, extremely noxious to an adult. Contempt is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of denigration, rage and disgust. Rage creates fear, and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention. Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves and children who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.

Narcissistic and borderline parents typically choose at least one child to be the designated family scapegoat. Scapegoating is the process by which a bully offloads and externalizes his pain, stress, and frustration by attacking a less powerful person. Typically scapegoating brings the bully some momentary relief. It does not however effectively metabolize or release his pain, and scapegoating soon resumes as the bully’s internal discomfort resurfaces.

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.

Early abuse and abandonment forces the child to merge his identity with the superego, the part of the child’s brain that learns the rules of his caretakers in order to get and maintain acceptance. However, because acceptance is impossible in the Cptsd-engendering family, the superego gets stuck working overtime to achieve the impossible. 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.

The healthy ego is the user friendly manager of the psyche. Unfortunately, Cptsd-inducing parents thwart the growth of the ego by undermining the development of the crucial egoic processes of self-compassion and self-protection. 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.

Cptsd-engendering parents often hypocritically attack their children’s emotional expression in a bi-modal way. This occurs when the child is both abused for emoting and is, at the same time, abused by her caretaker’s toxic emotional expression.

Some parents can shower love on babies. But as soon as the child begins toddling around and expressing a will of her own, they become severely punishing and rejecting.

Being yourself can be intimidating and flashback-inducing. Healthy self-assertion was punished like a capital crime in many dysfunctional families. Expressing yourself in ways that your parents forbade typically triggers intense flashbacks at first. This can cause you to lose sight of how this practice gradually reduces the chronic pain of remaining invisible.

However, much that is also traumatic goes unnoticed in Cptsd-engendering families. This often occurs because parental acts of physical abuse are more blatant than acts of verbal and emotional abuse and neglect. It appears to me that just as many children acquire Cptsd from emotionally traumatizing families as from physically traumatizing ones.

Ongoing assault with critical words systematically destroys our self-esteem and replaces it with a toxic inner critic that incessantly judges us as defective. Even worse, words that are emotionally poisoned with contempt infuse the child with fear and toxic shame. Fear and shame condition him to refrain from asking for attention, from expressing himself in ways that draw attention. Before long, he learns to refrain from seeking any kind of help or connection at all.

Repeated messages of disdain are internalized and adopted by the child, who eventually repeats them over and over to himself. Incessant repetitions result in the construction of thick neural pathways of self-hate and self-disgust. Over time a self-hate response attaches to more and more of the child’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Traumatic emotional neglect occurs when a child does not have a single caretaker to whom she can turn in times of need or danger. Cptsd then sets in to the degree that there is no alternative adult [relative, older sibling, neighbor, or teacher] to turn to for comfort and protection.

Fear hard-wired in the child as a healthy response to separation from a protective adult. Fear also linked automatically with the fight response so that the infant and toddler would automatically cry angrily for attention, help, and cessation of abandonment. Cptsd-inducing families however loathe angry crying, and many can find professionals to back them up for routinely leaving babies and very young children to “cry it out” on their own.

If this is what you suffered, you then grew up feeling that no one likes you. No one ever listened to you or seemed to want you around. No one had empathy for you, showed you warmth, or invited closeness. No one cared about what you thought, felt, did, wanted or dreamed of. You learned early that, no matter how hurt, alienated, or terrified you were, turning to a parent would do nothing more than exacerbate your experience of rejection.

He started riffing: “I’m going to start a greeting card business for people like me. I’m going to make a line of cards for people with dysfunctional mothers. How about this? ‘Thanks Mom for never knowing what grade I was in’; or ‘Thanks Mom for all the memories of you walking away whenever I was hurting’; or ‘Thanks Mom for teaching me how to only notice what was wrong me’; or ‘Thanks Mom for teaching me how to frown at myself in self-disgust.’”

He'd make a fortune.

Many freeze types hide away in their rooms and reveries fully convinced that the world of relating holds nothing for them. Freeze type who have not been totally turned off relationships by horrible childhood neglect or abuse, gravitate to online relationships. Online relating can be pursued safely at home with as little contact as desired.

Fight types learn to respond to their feelings of abandonment with anger. Many use contempt, a poisonous blend of narcissistic rage and disgust, to intimidate and shame others into mirroring them. Narcissists treat others as if they are as extensions of themselves. The entitled fight type commonly uses others as an audience for his incessant monologing. He may treat a “captured” freeze or fawn type as a slave in a dominance-submission relationship. The price of admission to a relationship with an extreme narcissist is self-annihilation. One of my clients quipped: “Narcissists don’t have relationships; they take prisoners.”

If the charming bully is charismatic enough, those close to him will often fail to register the unconscionable meanness of his scapegoating. The bully’s favorites often slip into denial, relieved that they are not the target. Especially charismatic bullies may even be admired and seen as great. Being the scapegoated child or spouse of such a bully is especially problematic because it is so difficult to get anyone to validate that you were or are being abused by them.

It is often the scapegoat or the most profoundly abandoned child, “the lost child”, who is forced to habituate to the freeze response. Not allowed to successfully employ fight, flight or fawn responses, the freeze type’s defenses develop around classical or right-brain dissociation. Dissociation allows the freeze type to disconnect from experiencing his abandonment pain, and protects him from risky social interactions - any of which might trigger feelings of being retraumatized. If you are a freeze type, you may seek refuge and comfort by dissociating in prolonged bouts of sleep, daydreaming, wishing and right-brain-dominant activities like TV, online browsing and video games.

The disenfranchisement of the fawn type begins in childhood. She learns early that a modicum of safety and attachment can be gained by becoming the helpful and compliant servant of her exploitive parents. A fawn type/codependent is usually the child of at least one narcissistic parent. The narcissist reverses the parent-child relationship. The child is parentified and takes care of the needs of the parent, who acts like a needy and sometimes tantruming child. When this occurs, the child may be turned into the parent’s confidant, substitute spouse, coach, or housekeeper.

Pressing a child into codependent service usually involves scaring and shaming him out of developing a sense of self. Of all the 4F types, fawn types are the most developmentally arrested in their healthy sense of self.

The implicit code of the fawn type is that it is safer [1] to listen than to talk, [2] to agree than to dissent, [3] to offer care than to ask for help, [4] to elicit the other than to express yourself and [5] to leave choices to the other rather than to express preferences.

The look, in most cases, is the facial expression that typically accompanies contempt. Contempt is a powerful punishing visage backed up by an emotional force-field of intimidation and disgust. A raised voice can be added intermittently to the look to amp up its power.

When a parent gives the look to a child, she is “telling” him that he is not only in serious jeopardy, but that he is also “a sorry excuse for a human being”. Over time, the look can make the recipient feel terrified and repugnant, as it drives him into an emotional flashback of fear and shame.

Scapegoating is often a reenactment of a parent’s abusive role. It is blind imitation of a parent who habitually released his frustration by indiscriminately raging. When a fight type parent scapegoats those around him, he enforces a perverse kind of mirroring. He is making sure that when he feels bad, so does everyone else. It is like a bumper sticker I saw the other day: “If Momma ain’t happy, Nobody’s happy.”