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If we do not notice the degrees of our own improvement in our recovery work, we are in great danger of giving up on recovering. Because of black-and-white thinking, we can regularly fall into the trap of not acknowledging and valuing what we are actually accomplishing. Perfectionistic dismissal of improvement that is not 100% is common in early recovery.
social anxiety can gradually reduce along a continuum that stretches from panicky withdrawal... to a more tolerable social discomfort... to periods of social ease. Additionally, depression can gradually diminish along a continuum that stretches from paralyzing despair... to anhedonia – an inability to enjoy normal life pleasures... to a state of tired, and relatively unmotivated peacefulness. Of course both these processes typically improve at a vacillating, back-and-forth rate.
I feel some old sadness about the many decades that I judged my emotional tone and mood as either good or bad in a very all-or-nothing way. If I was not feeling very good than I felt as if everything was really bad. And since feeling very good is something most human beings only get to experience a relatively small proportion of the time, my perception of feeling bad became a much more dominant experience than was necessary. In fact, mildly unpleasant feeling typically morphed me quickly into feeling terrible via shame-tinged, all-or-none thinking.
It is exceedingly difficult to accept the proposition – the fact – that recovery is never complete. And although we can expect our flashbacks to markedly decrease over time, it is tremendously difficult, and sometimes impossible, to let go of the salvation fantasy that we will one day be forever free of them. Yet when we do not loosen our grip on the salvation fantasy, we remain extremely susceptible to blaming ourselves every time we have a flashback.
When we flashback, we regress to our child-mind which was incapable of imagining a future any different than the everlasting present of being so abandoned.
So how can we come to bear the knowledge that our awful childhoods have created some permanent damage? It helps me to see my Cptsd as somewhat analogous to diabetes, i.e., a condition that will need management throughout my life. This is a piece of bad news that naturally feels offensively unpalatable, but the good news, as with diabetes, is that as we become more skilled at flashback management, Cptsd can gradually become infrequently bothersome. And even more importantly, we can evolve towards leading increasingly rich and rewarding lives.
It is crucial for deeper level recovery that we learn that feelings of fear, shame and guilt are sometimes signs that we have said or done the right thing. They are emotional flashbacks to how we were traumatized for trying to claim normal human privileges.
As our recovery progresses, we need to learn to endure these feelings. Reinterpreting the deeper meaning of these feelings is key to accomplishing this. Typically this involves epiphanies like the following. “I feel afraid now, but I am not in danger like I was as a child.” “I feel guilty not because I am guilty, but because I was intimidated into feeling guilty for expressing my opinions, my needs and my preferences.” “I feel shame because my parents rained disgust on me for being me. I say no to these toxic parental curses, and I am proud and right to see how they tried to murder my soul. I
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lifelong recovering is an exalted subset of lifelong learning. I believe that optimal stress is frequently attained when we practice the behaviors that remedy our developmental arrests.
The silver lining in this, however, is that many of us were forced to consciously address our suffering because our wounding was so much more severe. Those who work an effective recovery program not only recover significantly from emotional damage, but also evolve out of the emotional impoverishment of the general society. One of my clients described this as becoming “way more emotionally intelligent than the ‘normies’.”
Feelings of love, appreciation and gratitude are naturally enhanced when we reciprocally show our full selves - confident or afraid, loving or alienated, proud or embarrassed.
Many of the most intimate relationships that I have seen are between people who have done a great deal of freeing themselves from the negative legacies of their upbringings.
I suspect that some traumatized children do die from their abandonment. Perhaps, their immune systems weaken and make them more susceptible to diseases. Perhaps, as David Kalshed hints, they unconsciously gravitate toward lethal “accidents” to terminate their misery.
Emotional intelligence and its cohort, relational intelligence, are forced into developmental arrest by abandoning parents. Children never learn that a relationship with a healthy person can be comforting and enriching. The ability to open to and benefit from love and caring from others often lays dormant and undeveloped.
De-minimization is a lifetime process. Revisiting a central issue of our abandonment picture sometimes impacts us even more deeply than it did at first. One such occasion left me reeling with the certain knowledge that getting hit felt preferable to being abandoned for long hours outside my depressed mother’s locked bedroom door. I would pound on the door even though I knew she would explode because I just could not bear the isolation.
Bitter-sweet tears are not uncommon in the ongoing work of peeling the layers of the denial onion. The tears are bitter because we realize the abandonment was even more devastating than we previously realized. And then the tears are sweet because they validate the truth of the recollection and put the blame where it truly belongs. And then they may be bitter again because the horrible abandonments happened over and over again when we were so young and legitimately needed so much help. And then they can turn sweet again, as in tears of gratitude, because a person often comes through this kind
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A survivor also avoids vulnerable relating because his past makes him believe that he will be attacked or abandoned as he was in childhood. This is why showing vulnerability often triggers painful emotional flashbacks.
Many fight types avoid real intimacy by alienating others with their angry and controlling demands for unconditional love. This unrealistic demand to have their unmet childhood needs met destroys the possibility of intimacy. Moreover, some fight types delude themselves into believing that they are perfect. They see the other as the one who needs to be perfected. This defensive belief then entitles them to totally blame their partners for relationship problems.
As the recovering fight type becomes more conscious of his abandonment feelings, he can learn to release his fear and shame with tears. I have helped several fight types by guiding them to cry to release their hurt, rather than always polarizing to angering it out. When we are hurt, part of us is sad and part of us is mad, and no amount of angering can ever metabolize our sadness.
If you are a flight type, you can enhance your recovery greatly by giving yourself a few of these each day. You can start a chair meditation by closing your eyes. Gently ask your body to relax. Feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. Breathe deeply and slowly.
The freeze type can be so frozen in the retreat mode that it seems as if their starter button is stuck in the “off” position. Of all the 4F’s, freeze types seem to have the deepest unconscious belief that people and danger are synonymous. While all 4F types commonly suffer from social anxiety as well, freeze types typically take a great deal more refuge in solitude. Some freeze types completely give up on relating to others and become extremely isolated. Outside of fantasy, many also give up entirely on the possibility of love.
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.
Several of my freeze type respondents highly recommend a self-help book by Suzette Boon, entitled Coping with Trauma-related Dissociation. This book is filled with very helpful work sheets that are powerful tools for recovering.
Gradual trust building allows the recoveree to open to psychoeducation about the role of dreadful parenting in his suffering. This then paves the way for the work of shrinking his critic, which in turn promotes the work of grieving the losses of childhood. The anger work of grieving is especially therapeutic for freeze types as is an aerobic exercise regime. Both help resuscitate the survivor’s dormant will and drive.
The fight-fawn also differs from the fawn-fight in that his “care-taking” often feels coercive or manipulative. It is frequently aimed at achieving personal agendas which range from blatant to covert. Moreover, the fight-fawn rarely takes any real responsibility for contributing to an interpersonal problem. He typically ends up in the classic fight position of projecting imperfection onto the other. This essentially narcissistic type is also different than the fawn-fight in that entitlement is typically much more ascendant in the fight-fawn. His fawn behavior is typically devoid of real
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A healthy relationship with yourself is seen in your ability to move in a balanced way[1] between doing and being, [2] between persistence and letting go, [3] between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation, and [4] between intense focus and relaxed, daydreamy reverie.
As I free-associated on this I also realized that I was addicted to apologizing. I had apologized for long traffic lights, for changes in the weather, and most especially for other people’s mistakes and bad moods.
Servitude, ingratiation, and obsequiousness become important survival strategies. She cleverly forfeits all needs that might inconvenience her parents. She stops having preferences and opinions that might anger them. Boundaries of every kind are surrendered to mollify her parents, who repudiate their duty of caring for her. As we saw in the last chapter, she is often parentified and becomes as thoroughly helpful to the parent as she can.
The severely neglected child experiences extreme lack of connection as traumatic, and sometimes responds to this fearful condition by overdeveloping the fawn response. Once a child realizes that being useful and not requiring anything for herself gets her some positive attention from her parents, codependency begins to grow. It becomes an increasingly automatic habit over the years.
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. Sadly, the closest that the unrecovered fawn type comes to getting his needs met is vicariously through helping others.
Many fawn-freeze types only make token efforts at recovery, if they do not avoid it altogether. Often fawn-freezes were forced to so thoroughly abandon their protective instincts that they become trapped in what psychologists call learned helplessness.
Numerous times I have heard DV victims say: “But, I don’t want to act like a victim!” Usually, I then try to help them see how much they truly were victims in childhood. However, if I cannot get them to see this they usually are not able to rescue themselves from their current victimization.
Some fawn-flights project their perfectionism on others. They can appoint themselves as honorary advisers, and overburden others with their advice. However, it behooves fawn-flights to learn that caring is not always about fixing. This is especially true when the person we are trying to help is in emotional pain. Many times all that person needs is empathy, acceptance and an opportunity to verbally ventilate. Moreover some mood states also need time to resolve. Loving people when they are feeling bad is a powerful kind of caring.
Fawn-fight types may periodically reach a critical mass of frustration that erupts when the “patient” refuses his advice or balks at his unwanted caretaking. Sometimes the fawn-fight feels an entitlement to punish the other “for their own good”, especially in a primary relationship.
Psychoeducation about their parents’ role in creating their fawn response has helped many of my clients. Many instantly grasped that their codependence comes from having been continuously attacked and shamed as selfish for even the most basic level of healthy self-interest. One fortyish client estimated that she had scorned herself as “selfish” countless times, until one night she had the epiphany that she was by far not selfish enough.
We need to intuit and puzzle together a detailed picture of the trauma that first frightened us out of our instincts of healthy self-expression. When we emotionally remember how overpowered we were as children, we can begin to realize that it was because we were too small and powerless to assert ourselves. But now in our adult bodies, we are in a much more powerful situation.
Another clue that we are in a flashback occurs when we notice that our emotional reactions are out of proportion to what has triggered them. Here are two common instances of this: [1] a minor upset feels like an emergency; [2] a minor unfairness feels like a travesty of justice.
An especially strong urge to use more substance or process than normal is a powerful clue that you are in a flashback. With practice, mindfully noticing a sudden upsurge in craving can be interpreted as the need to invoke the flashback management steps. Moreover, I see many survivors gradually decrease their self-medicating habits by effectively using these steps.
With undetectable triggers, I find that it is most helpful to see a flashback as a communication from the child that you were. The child is reminding you that he woke up feeling desolate innumerable times in that house that was not a home. He woke up daunted by the prospect of once again having to reenter the poisonous milieu of your family. The child is now asking you to meet his unmet need of having someone to go to for comfort when he wakes up feeling wretched. It is as if he is saying: “See! This is how bad it was – this is how overwhelmed, ashamed and miserable I felt so much of the
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Another particularly triggering existential phenomenon is the fact that we all suffer invisible, unpredictable mood shifts. Good moods sometimes inexplicably deteriorate into bad ones. As novelist, David Mitchell wrote “Good moods are as fragile as eggs… and bad moods as fragile as bricks”.
The inner child often experiences this as you reverting to the pre-recovery adult who had no time for feelings. The child then feels that he is once again trapped in the past where he was so devastatingly abandoned. Perhaps, the resultant flashback is his only way to really get your attention. This is, again, why I try to make my default position turning to myself and my inner child with unconditional positive regard as much as possible.
The inner critic is the superego gone bad. The inner critic is the superego in overdrive desperately trying to win your parents’ approval. When perfectionist striving fails to win welcoming from your parents, the inner critic becomes increasingly hostile and caustic. It festers into a virulent inner voice that increasingly manifests self-hate, self-disgust and self-abandonment. The inner critic blames you incessantly for shortcomings that it imagines to be the cause of your parents’ rejection. It is incapable of understanding that the real cause lies in your parents’ shortcomings.
Hypervigilance narrows your attention into an incessant, on-guard scanning of the people around you. It also frequently projects you into the future, imagining danger in upcoming social events. Moreover, hypervigilance typically devolves into intense performance anxiety on every level of self-expression. Like the soldier overlong in combat, ptsd sets in because you feel as if you are constantly under attack. Unfortunately, internal attack is now added to external attack, and you become locked into hypervigilance and sympathetic nervous system arousal.
Perfectionism. My perfectionism arose as an attempt to gain safety and support in my dangerous family. Perfection is a self-persecutory myth. I do not have to be perfect to be safe or loved in the present. I am letting go of relationships that require perfection. I have a right to make mistakes. Mistakes do not make me a mistake. Every mistake or mishap is an opportunity to practice loving myself in the places I have never been loved.
All-or-None & Black-and-White Thinking. I reject extreme or over-generalized descriptions, judgments or criticisms. One negative happenstance does not mean I am stuck in a never-ending pattern of defeat. Statements that describe me as “always” or “never” this or that, are typically grossly inaccurate.
Drasticizing/Catastrophizing/Hypochondriasizing. I feel afraid but I am not in danger. I am not “in trouble” with my parents. I will not blow things out of proportion. I refuse to scare myself with thoughts and pictures of my life deteriorating. No more home-made horror movies and disaster flicks. I will not turn every ache and pain into a story about my imminent demise. I am safe and at peace.
Negative focus. I renounce over-noticing and dwelling on what might be wrong with me or life around me. I will not minimize or discount my attributes. Right now, I notice, visualize and enumerate my accomplishments, talents and qualities, as well as the many gifts that life offers me, e.g., nature, music, film, food, beauty, color, friends, pets, etc.
As the quest for perfection fails over and over, and as parental acceptance and nurturing remain elusive, imperfection becomes synonymous with shame and fear. Perceived imperfection triggers fear of abandonment, which triggers self-hate for imperfection, which expands abandonment into self-abandonment. This in turn amps fear up even further, which in turn intensifies self-disgust, etc. On and on it goes in a downward spiral of fear and shame-encrusted depression. It can go on for hours, days, weeks, and for those with severe Cptsd, can become their standard mode of being.
If I had to describe the two most key processes of the critic, I would say this. First, the critic is above all a self-perpetuating process of extreme negative noticing. Second the critic is a constant hypervigilance that sees disaster hovering in the next moment about to launch into a full-court-press.
Angrily saying “No!” to the critic sets an internal boundary against unnatural, anti-self processes. It is the hammer of self-renovating carpentry that rebuilds our instinct of self-protection. Furthermore recovery is deepened by directing our anger at anyone who helped install the critic, as well as at anyone who is currently contributing to keeping it alive.
