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.

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.

Toxic shame also inhibits us from seeking comfort and support.

Moreover, many are also unfairly and inaccurately labeled with bipolar, narcissistic, codependent, autistic spectrum and borderline disorders.

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.

The key point is that these labels are incomplete and unnecessarily shaming descriptions of what the survivor is actually afflicted with.

Reducing Cptsd to “panic disorder” is like calling food allergies chronically itchy eyes.

In this vein, I believe that many substance and process addictions also begin as misguided, maladaptations to parental abuse and abandonment.

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

shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from e...

His sympathetic nervous system is locked “on” and he cannot toggle into the relaxation function of the parasympathetic nervous system.

what Alice Miller called a “Prisoner of Childhood.”

Abusive and abandoning parents can injure and abandon us on many levels: cognitive, emotional, spiritual, physical and relational.

Cognitive work is fundamental to helping you disidentify from the self-hating critic with which your parents inculcated you.

“Ego”, contrary to popular usage, is not a dirty word. 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.

The more you identify their damage the more you know what to fix.

Cognitive tools are irreplaceable in healing cognitive issues, but they do not address all the levels of our wounding.

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.

Mindfulness is essential for guiding us at every level of recovering,

Traumatizing parents do as much damage to our emotional natures as they do to our thinking processes.