Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

A further silver lining in recovery is the attainment of a much richer internal life.

As the survivor recovers the right of free choice, she becomes more open to trying new things – healthy things that mainstream society might consider uncool or even taboo.

Finally, another silver lining, often achieved in later stage recovery, is a greater ability to handle normal pain in the most healthy and least retraumatizing way.

By normal pain, I mean the recurring existential pain all human beings experience from time to time via encounters with loss, illness, money troubles, time pressures, etc.

One reason that recovering survivors attain greater emotional intelligence is that they eventually see through the mainstream media’s indoctrination that people should be happy all the time.

As we become more emotionally intelligent, we free ourselves from the hysteria-inducing pressure to continuously pump up the joy in our life.

became mindful enough to see how he was shaming himself for not being as jubilant as those in the beer commercials.

Denial about the traumatic effects of childhood abandonment can seriously hamper your ability to recover. In childhood, ongoing emotional neglect typically creates overwhelming feelings of fear,

shame and emptiness. As an adult survivor, you may continuously flashback into this abandonment mélange. Recovering depends on realizing that fear, shame and depression are the lingering effects of a loveless childhood. Without such understanding, your crucial, unmet needs for comforting human connection can strand you in a great deal of unnecessary suffering.

Children so need to believe that their parents love and care for them, that they will deny and minimize away evidence of the most egregious neglect and abuse.

Identifying my father’s behavior as abusive eventually helped me become aware of less blatant aspects of my parents’ oppression, and I subsequently discovered the verbal and emotional abuse layer of the onion of my childhood abandonment.

The fact that verbal and emotional abuse can be traumatic is lost on many childhood trauma victims, though it is rarely lost on recovering victims of cult brainwashing who also are prone to developing Cptsd.

Theoretical Neurobiology Of The Critic

Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates internal neural networks of self-loathing. The child is forced to exist in a crippling state of self-attack, which eventually becomes the equivalent of full-fledged self-abandonment. The ability to support himself or take his own side in any way is decimated.

A childhood rife with verbal and emotional abuse forces the child to so thoroughly identify with the critic, that it is as if the critic is his whole identity.

Disidentification from the critic is the fight of a lifetime. To liberate your identity from the toxic critic, you will have to repetitively confront it for a long time. You will have greater success if you are prepared to forgive yourself for repeatedly collapsing back into the old habit of self-blame.

Ironically, a pernicious type of self-hate can constellate around the self-judgment that one is especially defective because she cannot simply banish the critic. This is the ty...

Much of the constant anxiety that adult survivors live in is this still aching fear that comes from having been so frighteningly abandoned.

Traumatic emotional neglect occurs when a child does not have a single caretaker to whom she can turn in times of need or danger.

The Failure To Thrive Syndrome

Modern medicine now accepts as scientific fact the principle that babies need a great deal of physical touch and nurturing in order to thrive. In my experience, failure to thrive is not an all-or-none phenomenon, but rather a continuum that stretches from the abandonment depression to death.

The emotional hunger that comes from parental abandonment often morphs over time into an insatiable appetite for substances and/or addictive processes. Minimization of early abandonment

often transforms later in life into the minimizing that some survivors use to rationalize their substance and process addictions.

However many survivors are now in a position to see how self-destructive their addictions are. They are now old enough to learn healthier ways of self-soothing.

The desire to reduce such habits can therefore be used as motivation to learn the more sophisticated forms of self-soothing that Cptsd recovery work has to offer.

As we will see in chapter 11, grieving work offers us irreplaceable tools for working through inner pain. This then helps obviate the need to harmfully distract ourselves from our pain.

Fear hard-wired in the child as a healthy response to separation from a protective adult.

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.

Over time the child’s dominant experience of herself is so replete with emotional pain and so unmanageable that that she has to dissociate, self-medicate, act out [aggression against others] or act in [aggression against the self] to distract from it.

Holyfuckwhiteness

Through such neglect the child’s consciousness eventually becomes overwhelmed with the processes of drasticizing and catastrophizing. Drasticizing and catastrophizing are critic processes that lead the child to constantly rehearse fearful scenarios in a vain attempt to prepare himself for the worst. This is the process by which Cptsd with its overdeveloped stress and toxic shame programs sets in and becomes triggerable by a plethora of normally innocuous stimuli.

This people-are-dangerous process typically devolves into the social anxiety that is frequently a symptom of Cptsd. In worst case scenarios it manifests as social phobia and agoraphobia. In my opinion, agoraphobia is rarely the fear of open spaces.

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.

Most people remember little before they were four years old. And by that time, much of this kind of damage is done.

Practicing Vulnerability Emotional abandonment is healed by the type of real intimacy that we have been discussing. And

once again real intimacy depends on us showing up in times of vulnerability. Deep-level recovering occurs when we successfully connect with a safe enough other during the flashbacked-times of feeling trapped in the fear, shame and depression of the abandonment mélange.

Gratefully, sufficient positive experiences with my therapist eventually emboldened me to bring my authentic vulnerability to other select and gradually proven relationships, where I found the acceptance, safety and support that, previously, I would not have known to wish for.

There are limitations of the analogy of the onion. Later recovery does typically involve working at various levels at the same time. 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.

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 of depth work with an enhanced compassion for what she suffered and a healthy pride about having survived.

The Power Of Narrative There is also growing evidence that recovery from Complex PTSD is reflected in the narrative a person tells about her life. The degree of recovery matches the degree to which a survivor’s story is complete, coherent, and emotionally congruent and told from a self-sympathetic perspective.

Understanding how profoundly derelict your parents were in their duty to nurture and protect you is a master key to your recovery. You will benefit greatly from seeing emotional flashbacks as direct messages from your child-self about how much your parents rejected you. When denial is significantly deconstructed, you will typically feel genuine compassion for the child that you were. This self-compassion assuages emotional neglect by providing you with the missed childhood experience of receiving empathy in painful emotional states instead of contempt or abandonment. This, then, helps you to reverse the childhood-survival habit of automatic self-abandonment. In turn, this can further motivate you to identify and address the many ways you were abused and/or neglected. Chapter 8 of my book, The Tao of Fully Feeling, provides detailed guidelines for assessing and remediating your abuse/neglect picture.

Healthy Employment Of The 4 F’s People who experience “good enough parenting” in childhood arrive in adulthood with a healthy and flexible response repertoire to danger. In the face of real danger, they have appropriate access to all of their 4F choices. Easy access to the fight response insures good boundaries, healthy assertiveness and aggressive self-protectiveness if necessary. Untraumatized people also easily and appropriately access their flight instinct and disengage and retreat when confrontation would exacerbate their danger. Untraumatized people also freeze appropriately and give up and quit struggling when further activity or resistance is futile or counterproductive. Additionally, the freeze response is sometimes our first response to danger, as when we become still, quiet and camouflaged to buy time, to assess the

danger and decide whether fight, flight, continued freeze or fawn is our best option. And finally, untraumatized people also fawn in a non-groveling manner and are able to listen, help, and compromise as readily as they assert and express themselves and their needs, rights and points of view. A deeper elaboration of the origins of these four defenses is found below and in the next chapter. POSITIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOUR F’S Those who are repetitively traumatized in childhood often learn to survive by over-using one or two of the 4F Reponses. Fixation in any one 4F response not only limits our ability to access all the others, but also severely impairs our ability to relax

into an undefended state. Additionally, it strands us in a narrow, impoverished experience of life. Over time a habitual 4F defense also “serves” to distract us from the nagging voice of the critic and the painful feelings that underlie it. Preoccupation with 4F behaviors dulls our awareness of our unresolved past trauma and the pain of our current alienation. This chart compares the harmful behaviors of each defensive structure. Real or imagined danger typically trigg...

CPTSD AS AN ATTACHMENT DISORDER

Many flight types stay perpetually busy and industrious to avoid being triggered by deeper relating.

Many fawn types avoid emotional investment and potential disappointment by barely showing themselves. They hide behind their helpful personas and over-listen, over-elicit and/or overdo for the other. By over-focusing on their partners, they then do not have to risk real self-exposure and the possibility of deeper level rejection. This chart compares and contrasts the differences between the four types.

4F DISTORTIONS OF ATTACHMENT AND SAFETY INSTINCTS