Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

Successful critic-shrinking usually requires thousands of angry skirmishes with the critic. Passionate motivation for this work often arises when we construct an accurate picture of our upbringing. Natural anger eventually arises when we really get how little and defenseless we were when our parents bullied us into hating ourselves.

gratitude is a type of mindfulness that looks for empirical proof that life is essentially good even though it is also quite difficult at times.

the concept of gratitude is damagingly used by some psychologists to support the psychological defense of denial. They tout gratitude as a fast track that can bypass traumatic pain. This is worse than absurd when applied to Cptsd survivors. It is in fact shamefully abusive to survivors because profound, extended trauma cannot be resolved until it is fully understood and worked through.

The outer critic is the counterpart of the self-esteem-destroying inner critic. It uses the same programs of perfectionism and endangerment against others that your inner critic uses against yourself. Via its all-or-none programming, the outer critic rejects others because they are never perfect and cannot be guaranteed to be safe.

Without realizing it, we can amass a video collection of real and imagined betrayals that destroy our capacity to be nurtured by human contact. “Don’t trust anyone”, “Proud to be a loner”, “You can only depend on yourself”, “Lovers always leave you”, “Kids will break your heart”, “Only fools let on what they really think”, “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile”, are titles of video themes survivors may develop in their quest for interpersonal safety.

Even worse, retaliation fantasies can plague us for hours and days on the occasions when we do show our vulnerabilities. I once experienced this after being very honest and vulnerable in a job interview with a committee of eight. Over the next three insomnia-plagued nights, my outer critic ran non-stop films featuring my interviewers’ contempt about everything I had said, and disgust about all that I had left out. Even after they subsequently and enthusiastically hired me, the outer critic plagued me with “imposter syndrome” fantasies of eventually being exposed as incompetent in the new job.

My parents’ twisted version of this boiled down to: “As f*cked up as we are, we’re still way better than you”. Karen Horney described this trauma two-step as all-or-none lurching between the polarities of the grandiose self and the despised self.

When we become lost in this process, we miss out on our crucial emotional need to experience a sense of belonging. We live in permanent estrangement oscillating between the extremes of too good for others or too unlikeable to be included. This is the excruciating social perfectionism of the Janus-faced critic: others are too flawed to love and we are too defective to be lovable.

Reducing outer critic reactivity requires a great deal of mindfulness. This is as essential for fight types who act out aggressively, as it is for those trauma types who internally rant against the entire human group known as “F*cking People!”.

Cognitive work in both cases involves the demolition and rebuilding processes of thought-stopping and thought substitution, respectively. And, emotional work in both instances is grief work. It is removing the critic’s fuel supply - the unexpressed childhood anger and the uncried tears of a lifetime of abandonment.

Nonetheless, fear of parental reprisal is often the unconscious dynamic that scares us out of challenging our own toxic thinking. This is why survivors in early recovery often need to invoke the instinct of angry self-protection to empower their thought-stopping.

the critic grew carcinogenically in childhood. It is like a pervasive cancer that requires many uncomfortable operations to remove. Nonetheless, we can choose to face the acute pain of critic-shrinking work because we want to end the chronic pain of having the critic destroy our enjoyment of life. It is the fight of a lifetime.

Grieving out old unexpressed pain about our poor parenting gradually deconstructs the process of transferring it unfairly onto others. This is crucial because love and intimacy are murdered when the critic habitually projects old anger out at an intimate.

There are times when venting from the outer critic perspective is healthy, self-protective behavior. Sometimes the outer critic’s judgments are accurate. Sometimes people are acting as abusively as our parents did in childhood. In this vein, there are two healthy applications of outer critic aggressiveness. One is to protect ourselves when someone is actually attacking us. The other is in the work of grieving the losses of childhood.

And then the tears came. Shortly after they subsided, the epiphany arrived. It made him laugh. Genuinely. It was the laughter of relief that we sometimes get when we finally understand why something is really bothering us. He said: “You know this sounds pretty far-fetched and like that psychobabble I hate, but it’s the goddamn unfairness of life that just pisses me off so much. You know that you-got-the-queen-of-spades bad luck. That bad luck of being the one person in the crowd who gets crapped on by a pigeon. That cursed luck of getting dealt those assholes from the parenting deck. It’s so goddamned unfair!

I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out: “It tastes sweet doesn’t it?” “You have caught me”, grief answered, “And you’ve ruined my business How can I sell sorrow, when you know its blessing?” -RUMI

Recoverees also need to grieve the death of their early attachment needs. We must grieve the awful fact that safety and belonging was scarce or non-existent in our own families. We need to mourn the myriad heartbreaks of our frustrated attempts to win approval and affection from our parents.

Soul ache is considerably harder to assign to the losses of childhood, yet those who take the grieving journey described below come to know unquestionably that the core of their soul ache and psychological suffering is in the unworked through losses of growing up with abandoning parents. These losses have to be grieved until the person really gets how much her caretakers were not caretakers, and how much her parents were not her allies. She needs to grieve until she stops blaming herself for their abuse and/or neglect. She needs to grieve until she fully realizes that their abysmal parenting practices gave her that awful gift that keeps on giving: Cptsd. She needs to grieve until she understands how her learned habit of automatic self-abandonment is a reenactment of their abject failure to be there for her.

Mourning these awful realities empowers our efforts to develop a multidimensional practice of self-care. As we grieve more effectively, our capacities for self-compassion and self-protection grow, and our psyche becomes increasingly user friendly.

“Pain is excess energy crying out for release.” – Gerald Heard

A survivor can learn to grieve himself out of fear - the death of feeling safe. He can learn to grieve himself out of shame - the death of feeling worthy. He can learn to grieve himself out of depression - the death of feeling fully alive.

With sufficient grieving, the survivor gets that he was innocent and eminently loveable as a child. As he mourns the bad luck of not being born to loving parents, he finds within himself a fierce, unshakeable self-allegiance. He becomes ready, willing and able to be there for himself no matter what he is experiencing - internally or externally.

I have worked with numerous survivors whose tears immediately triggered them into toxic shame. Their own potentially soothing tears elicited terrible self-attacks: “I’m so pathetic! No wonder nobody can stand me!” “God, I’m so unlovable when I snivel like this!” “I f*ck up, and then make myself more of a loser by whining about it!” “What good is crying for yourself – it only makes you weaker!” This latter response is particularly ironic, for once grieving is protected from the critic, nothing can restore a person’s inner strength and coping capacity like a good cry. I have defused active suicidality on dozens of occasions by simply eliciting the suffering person’s tears.

Angering can also immediately trigger the survivor into toxic shame. This is often true of instances when there is only an angry thought or fantasy. Dysfunctional parents typically reserve their worst punishments for their child’s anger. This then traps the child’s anger inside.

In the dysfunctional family however, the traumatizing parent soon eradicates the child’s capacity to emote. The child becomes afraid and ashamed of her own tears and anger. Tears get shut off and anger gets trapped inside and is eventually turned against the self as self-attack, self-hate, self-disgust, and self-rejection. Self-hate is the most grievous reenactment of parental abandonment.

angering rescues the survivor from toxic shame. It rescues him from blindly letting his parents’ venomous blame turn into shame. Angering redirects blame back to where it belongs. It also augments his motivation to keep fighting to establish internal boundaries against the critic.

Over time the vast majority of angering needs to be done silently in the privacy of your own psyche. This is the anger-empowered thought-stopping of shielding yourself from inner critic attacks.

angering serves to reduce or antidote fear. It reawakens and nurtures the instinct of self-preservation. With practice it increasingly builds a sense of both outer and inner boundaries. These boundaries increasingly move us out of harm’s way. They offer safety from the bullying of others, and safety from the most damaging bully of all – the inner critic.

In grieving, crying is the yin complementary process to the yang process of angering. When we are hurt, we instinctively feel sad as well as mad. The newborn child, hurt by the loss of the perfect security of the womb, howls an angry cry. Crying is also an irreplaceable tool for cutting off the critic’s emotional fuel supply. Tears can release fear before it devolves into frightened and frightening thinking. In fact, crying is sometimes the only process that will resolve a flashback. I have witnessed my own critic wither into innocuousness hundreds of times after a good cry.

I have seen my clients dissolve their fear, shame and self-abandonment with the solvent of their tears. I have also seen them then surface into a healthily angry place, determined to confront a current unfairness that they now find unacceptable.

“I think it’s the tears..... crying so much of late.....you were right! It’s great; I love it, tears of sadness, tears at the beauty in the world, tears of grief and loss, and tears of gratitude that my life is finally becoming manageable and even intimate. I’ve cried more in the past couple of months than I have done the past couple of decades. I am actually opening up to life, it’s become less narrow, it’s not just pain, shame, guilt.....there’s something else, something quite beautiful.”

Crying and angering are the two key emotional tools for releasing the pain of the abandonment mélange. Typically we need both processes to attain full release. Crying and angering together differs from whining. Whining is a type of emoting that gives grieving a bad name. Whining is a delicate subject because many people who complain and/or cry in a healthy manner are pathologized as “whiners.” Dysfunctional whining however is often an unhealthy mixture of angering and crying, where either the anger or sadness is repressed but leaks through in a grating manner.

Without complete emoting of his hurt, a survivor can become stuck in moodiness. His unexpressed emotion deteriorates into a stagnant and lingering mood. This moodiness can range from festering resentment to a shame-tainted self-pity that is anything but self-compassionate. Blocked anger can degenerate into bitter sullenness, and blocked sadness can deteriorate into melancholic self-indulgence.

When we can both anger and cry while re-experiencing our early abandonment in a flashback, we can obtain a more complete release from the abandonment mélange. Each survivor does well to assess whether his angering or crying is blocked or stultified, and to then work at recovering it.

“Joy shared is doubled. Sorrow shared is halved.” - Old Chinese saying

Verbal Ventilation is therapeutic to the degree that a person’s words are colored by and descriptive of the anger, sadness, fear, shame and/or depression she feels. Ventilation that is liberally punctuated with actual crying or angering is especially powerful.

MRI research demonstrates that emotional flashbacks over-activate the emotionally oriented right-brain and under-activate the thinking-oriented left-brain. With this hemispheric polarization, there is an overwhelming reemergence of childhood pain that is emotionally remembered by the memory-oriented right-brain. At the same time, the survivor loses access to the higher cognitive functions of her left-brain. This temporary loss of cognitive perspective explains why it is so hard for a survivor to realize that she is only flashing back, and not really lost in the danger, helplessness and hopelessness of the past.

Verbal ventilation, at its most potent, is the therapeutic process of bringing left-brain cognition to intense right-brain emotional activation. It fosters the recoveree’s ability to put words to feelings, and ultimately to accurately interpret and communicate about his various feeling states. When this process is repeated sufficiently, new neural pathways grow that allow the left- and right-brain to work together so that the person can actually think and feel at the same time.

With continued practice, verbal ventilation coordinates the left and right hemispheres of the brain so that whenever the right-brain is hyper-activated in flashback, the left-brain is also fully engaged [this also can be seen in an MRI]. With the left-brain back on line, the survivor can remember to use the flashback management steps to successfully help manage a flashback.

Dissociation is a defense that children develop to distract and protect themselves from the overwhelming pain of their abandonment. As unsupported children, we have to dissociate because we are not able to effectively grieve. We have to protect ourselves by not allowing the full brunt of our pain into awareness.

“Feeling is the antithesis of pain…the more pain one feels, the less pain one suffers” – Arthur Janov

Emoting is when we cry, anger out, or verbally ventilate the energy of an inner emotional experience. Feeling, on the other hand, is the inactive process of staying present to internal emotional experience without reacting. In recovery then, feeling is surrendering to our internal experiences of pain without judging or resisting them, and without emoting them out.

Feeling is a kinesthetic rather than a cognitive experience. It is the process of shifting the focus of your awareness off of thinking and onto your affects, energetic states and sensations. It is the proverbial “getting out of your head” and “getting into your body.”

Feeling “occurs” when we direct our attention to an emotionally or physically painful state, and surrender to this experience without resistance. When we relax acceptingly into our pain, we can learn to gently absorb it into our experience. Feeling then functions as if our awareness is a solvent that dissolves and metabolizes the affect, energy and sensation of our emotions.

When we become more mindful of the subtle sensations of feelings, the passive grieving process of feeling through them complements the active processes of grieving them out. We are typically in advanced recovery when we can both emote out and feel through our anger, sadness, fear, shame and depression.

Over time this practice will build his ability to stay passively present to the sensations of his deeper feelings – to his fear, shame and depression. But in early stages, this awareness will often morph into the need to actively emote them out – to grieve himself out of the abandonment mélange.

Visualize yourself as time-traveling back to a place in the past when you felt especially abandoned. See your adult self taking your abandoned child onto your lap and comforting her in various painful emotional states or situations. You can comfort her/him verbally: “I feel such sorrow that you were so abandoned and that you felt so alone so much of the time. I love you even more when you are stuck in this abandonment pain – especially because you had to endure it for so long with no one to comfort you. That shouldn’t have happened to you. It shouldn’t happen to any child. Let me comfort and hold you. You don’t have to rush to get over it. It is not your fault. You didn’t cause it and you’re not to blame. You don’t have to do anything. Just let me hold you. Take your time. I love you always and care about you no matter what.”

A survivor wakes up feeling depressed. Because childhood experience has conditioned her to believe that she is unworthy and unacceptable in this state, she feels anxious and ashamed. This in turn activates her inner critic to scare her with perfectionistic rants:

Retraumatized by her own inner voice, she then launches into her most habitual 4F behavior. She either lashes out domineeringly at the nearest person [Fight] – or she launches busily into anxious productivity [Flight] – or she flips on the TV and foggily tunes out or dozes off again [Freeze] – or she self-abandoningly redirects her attention to figuring out how to fix a friend’s problem [Fawn].

ABANDONMENT DEPRESSION ←→ FEAR & SHAME ←→ INNER CRITIC ←→ 4Fs