Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

critic’s perfectionistic and drasticizing processes. More and more, you stop persecuting yourself for normal foibles. Additionally, you perseverate less in disappointment about other people’s minor miscues.

allows you to use your fight, flight, freeze and fawn instincts in healthy and non-self-destructive ways.

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.

A further example of decreased reactivity is seen in a more balanced movement between the polar opposites of flight and freeze. This manifests as an improving equilibrium between doing and being, between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system arousal, and between left and right-brain processing.

Advanced recovery also correlates with letting go of the salvation fantasy that you will never have another flashback. Giving up the salvation fantasy is another one of those two steps forward, one step

It begins on the cognitive level when psychoeducation and mindfulness helps us understand that we have Cptsd.

shrinking the critic.

learning how to grieve effectively.

The phase of intensely grieving our childhood losses can last for a couple of years. When sufficient progress is made in grieving, the survivor naturally drops down into the next level of recovery work. 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.

Work here involves releasing the armoring and physiological reactivity in our body to the abandonment depression via the somatic work discussed in chapter 12.

many survivors need some relational help in achieving the complex tasks

As a flight type, I spent years in mid-range recovery workaholically spinning my wheels trying to fix and change everything at once. I describe this at greater length in the “When Recovery becomes Obsessive-Compulsive” section of my first book [p140-141].

We often need to simplify our self-help efforts in early recovery. Accordingly, I recommend making shrinking the critic [chapter 9] your “go to” response if you feel unsure of how to proceed.

Typically the inner critic is too omnipresent to confront on every occasion. To do so would often leave no time for anything else.

But when we practice critic-shrinking in a gradually increasing way over time, we can more consistently disidentify from its negative focus

When we practice enough, self-help starts to become a matter of common sense. It reverberates as right action and gradually takes on its own life

“Progress not perfection” is a powerful mantra for guiding our self-help recovery efforts.

Recovery involves learning to handle unpredictable shifts in our inner emotional weather.

In survival mode, even the most trivial and normally easy task can feel excruciatingly difficult. As in childhood, it is all feels just too hard.

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.

Being in survival is especially difficult during those times when flashback management is less effective, and feelings that life is a struggle can hang on for days and even weeks.

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.

Temptations can be great at such times to revert to the less functional ways of self-soothing that we learned when we younger. Depending on your 4F

type this commonly manifests as increased eating, substance abuse, working, sleeping and/or sexually acting out. Sometimes we are triggered into self-medicating in this way because we are desperately trying to keep ourselves on the thriving end of the continuum. Desperately clinging to thriving is a hard impulse to resist, even when we are in reality way past its expiration date.

as recovery and mindfulness increase we begin to notice that this type of self-medicating indicates that we are in a survival-flashback. We are no longer authentically on the thriving end of the continuum. We have compounded our regression, by regressing furthe...

At such times, we benefit most by reinvoking our intention to practice self-acceptance – by recommitting to being there for ourselves no...

Because of the all-or-none thinking that typically accompanies Cptsd, survivors in the early stages of recovery often fail to notice or validate their own actual progress.

Here are some common areas where I see that recovering survivors fail to notice and self-validate their progressive degrees of improvement. Less intense launching into a 4F response Increasing resistance to the critic Increased Mindfulness about flashbacks or inner critic attacks Increased time feeling good enough about yourself Progress in meeting arrested developments listed in chapter 2 Decreased overeating or use of self-medicating substances Increased experiences of good enough relating with others Decrease in the painfulness and intensity of flashback feelings

In terms of number 3 above, it is important to note that even when mindfulness does not immediately terminate a flashback or critic attack, noticing and identifying these Cptsd phenomena is more progressive than just being blindly lost in them.

ongoing recognition makes effective ameliorative action more accessible. It makes us increasingly likely to remember to use the flashb...

I am so grateful for the life-changing epiphany that lead me to trade in my old primary aspiration of “Celebration” for my new one of “Serenity.”

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. Understanding this is so crucial because recovery typically progresses in a process that has many temporary regressions. Moreover, most recoverees often have the unfortunate subjective experience

that the temporary regression feels as permanent as concrete. This is especially true because of the interminability feeling of flashbacks. 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.

Even better news is that Cptsd, when efficiently managed, eventually bestows gifts. It comes with significant silver linings - unavailable to those less

traumatized - as we will see at the end of the chapter.

Being yourself can be intimidating and flashback-inducing. Healthy self-assertion was punished like a capital crime in many dysfunctional families.

We can encourage ourselves to face these growing pains by conceptualizing them as therapeutic flashbacks.

Recovering from overwhelmingly painful childhoods is also so difficult because we understandably want to avoid any further pain at all.

Bravery is, in my opinion, defined by fear. It is taking right action despite being afraid. It is not brave to do things that are not scary. The anger work described in chapter 11 can help you with this enormously.

feeling the fear and doing it anyway. You can nudge yourself to do it to rescue your inner child from the loneliness of never being seen or heard.

when we embrace this practice we will eventually learn that fear does not have to disabling. We can be afraid and still act powerfully. We can refuse to tolerate never speaking up, never having our say, never stating a preference, and never saying “no” to set a boundary.

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.

Optimal Stress

Optimal stress is the balanced, moderate amount of stress that appears to be necessary to grow the new neurons and neuronal connections that correlate with keeping the brain healthy. Research shows that just as too much stress creates a biochemical condition that damages neurons in the brain, too little stress leads to the atrophy, death and lack of replacement of old neurons. This is why lifelong learning is widely recognized as one of the key practices necessary to avoid Alzheimer’s disease.

lifelong recovering is an exalted subset of lifelong learning.

We live in an emotionally impoverished culture, and those who stick with a long term recovery process are often rewarded with emotional intelligence far beyond the norm. This is somewhat paradoxical, as survivors of childhood trauma are initially injured more grievously in their emotional natures than those in the general population.

“way more emotionally intelligent than the ‘normies’.”

Emotional intelligence is a foundational ingredient of relational intelligence – a type of intelligence that is also frequently diminished in the general populace.

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.