Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

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.

Thus she responds by relinquishing her fight response, deleting “no” from

her vocabulary and never developing the language skills of healthy assertiveness.

Many toddlers, at some point, transmute the flight urge into the running around in circles of hyperactivity. This adaptation “works” on some

level to help them escape from the uncontainable feelings of the abandonment mélange. Many of these unfortunates later symbolically run away from their pain. They deteriorate into the obsessive-compulsive adaptations of workaholism, busyholism, spend-aholism, and sex and love addiction that are common in flight types.

The future codependent toddler, however, wisely gives up on the fight, flight and freeze responses. Instead she learns to fawn her way into the occasional safety of being perceived as helpful. It bears repeating that the fawn type is often one of the gifted children that Alice Miller writes about in The Drama Of The Gifted Child. She is the precocious

one who discovers that a modicum of safety can be purchased by becoming variously useful to her parent.

As we saw in the last chapter, she is often parentified and becomes as thoroughly helpful to the parent as she can. I wonder how many therapists besides me were prepared for their careers in this way.

These response patterns are so deeply set in the psyche, that as adults, many codependents automatically respond to threat like dogs, symbolically rolling over on their backs, wagging their tails, hoping for a little mercy and an occasional scrap.

A DEFINITON OF TRAUMA-BASED CODEPENDENCY

I define trauma-induced codependency as a syndrome of self-abandonment and self-abnegation. Codependency is a fear-based inability to express rights, needs and boundaries in relationship. It is a disorder of assertiveness, characterized by a dormant fight response and a susceptibility to being exploited, abused and/or neglected.

In conversations, codependents seek safety and acceptance in relationship through listening and eliciting. They invite the other to talk rather than risk exposing their thoughts, views, and feelings. They ask questions to keep the attention off themselves, because their parents taught them that talking was dangerous and that their words were indictments that would inevitably prove them guilty of being unworthy.

The implicit code of the fawn type is that it is safer [1] to listen than to ta...

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. Fawn types generally enhance their recovery by memorizing the list of Human Rights in To...

I think a certain amount of the confusion about codependency can be clarified through understanding the significant differences found in the three codependent subtypes that follow: fawn-freeze, fawn-flight and fawn-fight.

In worst case scenarios fawn-freezes are easily recognized by fight types who take them captive.

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.

Fawn-Flight: Super Nurse The fawn-flight type is most typically seen in the busyholic parent, nurse or administrative assistant who works from dawn until bedtime providing for the needs of the household, hospital or company. He compulsively takes care of everyone else’s needs with hardly a gesture toward his own. The fawn-flight is sometimes a misguided Mother Teresa type, who escapes the pain of her self-abandonment by seeing herself as the perfect, selfless caregiver. She further distances herself from her own pain by obsessive-compulsively rushing from one person in need to another.

#2 enneagram

Some fawn-flight clients also become OCD-like clean-aholics. One of my interns told me that her fawn-flight client had a dozen color-coded tooth brushes for various micro-cleaning tasks in her family’s bathroom and kitchen. 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. The above also relates to allowing others to be imperfect. We all have minor limitations and foibles that may not be transformable. Loved ones need to be spared from being pressured to fix what is unfixable. My way of approaching this is to always frame my advice as take-it or leave-it. To prove this is so, I refrain from then going on about

it repetitively. Additionally, I typically check in first to see if the other person act...

The recommendations in the last two paragraphs also apply to many of those survivors who are fawn-fight types. Some can be quite aggressive in their attempts to help others.

The fawn-fight type is the smother-love caretaker. Her care-taking approach of being over-focused on the other is sometimes a repetition of her childhood servant role. Moreover, her helpfulness is usually less self-serving than the fight-fawn that we discussed in the last chapter. Nonetheless, the zealousness of her caretaking sometimes makes the recipient believe it when she says “I just love you to death.” In flashback, the fawn-fight can deteriorate into manipulative or even coercive care-taking. He can smother love the other into conforming to his view of who she should be.

Another distinction between these two types is that fawn-fight type seeks real intimacy. She is the most relational hybrid and most susceptible to love addiction. She stands in contradistinction to the fight-fawn who is more addicted to physical release, and hence more susceptible to sex addiction.

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.

My client then realized that every time she thought of doing something for herself, she not only felt very anxious, but also ashamed that she was acting as ghastly as her mother.

Fawns need to understand that fear of being attacked for lapses in ingratiation causes them to forfeit their boundaries, rights and needs. Understanding this dynamic is a necessary but not sufficient step in recovery.

increasingly aware in new dating situations of how much I was over-eliciting my date.

Over time, I realized that my intention to be more forthcoming was frightening me into a flashback. This made me dissociate and forget everything I had planned to say. All I could think to do, when an amygdala hijacking took my left-brain off line, was to get my date talking. I then regressed to the tried and true safety position of listening and eliciting.

Race

Much later, I had the realization: “No wonder I wind up with one narcissist after another. Narcissists love me because I am so enabling of their monologing. I probably met lots of nice balanced people who did not want another date with me because it seemed like I was hiding and hard to get to know.”

To break free of their codependence, survivors must learn to stay present to the fear that triggers the self-abdication of the fawn response. In the face of their fear, they must try on and practice an expanding repertoire of more functional responses to fear. [See the flashback management steps in the next chapter]

Facing The Fear Of Self-Disclosure Real motivation for surmounting this challenge usually comes from family of origin work. 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. And even though we might still momentarily feel small and helpless when we are triggered, we can learn to remind ourselves that we are now in an adult body. We have an adult status that now offers us many more resources to champion ourselves and to effectively protest unfairness in relationships.

Grieving Through Codependence I usually find that deconstructing codependence involves a considerable amount of grieving. Typically this entails many tears about the loss and pain of being so long without healthy self-interest and self-protection. Grieving also unlocks healthy anger about a life lived with such a diminished sense of self. This anger can then be used to build a healthy fight response. Once again, the fight response is the basis of the instinct of ...

As the survivor learns to stay present in assertiveness role-plays, she becomes more aware of how fear triggers her into fawning. She can then practice staying present to her fear and acting assertively anyway.

With enough practice she then heals the developmental arrest of not having learned “to feel the fear and do it anyway.” This in turn sets the stage for deconstructing self-harmful reactions to fear like giving or compromising too much. Moreover, it makes the survivor more adept at flashback management.

And most importantly, she learns to stay inside herself.

Survivors now need to deconstruct this habit by working to stay more inside their own experience without constantly projecting their attention outward to read others. Fawn-types who are still habituated to people-pleasing, must work on reducing their ingratiating behaviors. I have noticed over the years that the degree to which a survivor strains to please me reflects the degree to which his parents were dangerous.

Recovering requires us to become increasingly mindful of our automatic matching and mirroring behaviors. This helps us decrease the habit of reflexively agreeing with everything that anyone says.

It is a great accomplishment to significantly reduce verbal matching. It is an even more powerful achievement to reduc...

I call this emotional individuation work. As such, recovery involves setting the kind of boundaries that help us to stay true to our own actual emotional experience.

I do not mean suppressing empathic attunement when it is genuine. Crying and laughing along with an intimate is a truly wonderful experience. Rather, what I am recommending here is resisting the pressure to pretend you are always feeling the same as someone else.

I can be there caringly for him without abandoning my own feeling of contentment in the moment.

“Disapproval Is Okay With Me” Early in recovery, an esteemed mentor gave me the affirmation “Disapproval is okay with me.”

I had unconsciously gravitated to this all-or-none nonsense because I was somewhat desperately trying to seduce everyone I met into liking me in the hope that I could finally feel safe.

I rest most of the time in receiving so much approval from my friends and intimates that I can usually let in their constructive feedback fairly easily. As a corollary to this, I rarely care what people think about me who I do not know or who do not know me.

I even occasionally experience some people’s disapproval as a good thing. Sometimes it is a validation that I am doing the right thing and evolving in the right direction.

Emotional flashbacks are intensely disturbing regressions [“amygdala hijackings”] to the overwhelming feeling-states of your childhood abandonment. When you are stuck in a flashback, fear, shame and/or depression can dominate your experience.

These are some common experiences of being in an emotional flashback. You feel little, fragile and helpless. Everything feels too hard. Life is too scary. Being seen feels excruciatingly vulnerable. Your battery seems to be dead. In the worst flashbacks an apocalypse feels like it will imminently be upon you.

When you are trapped in a flashback, you are reliving the worst emotional times of you childhood. Everything feels overwhelming and confusing, especially because there are rarely any visual components to a Cptsd flashback. This is because, as Goleman’s work shows, amygdala hijackings are intense reactions in the emotional memory part of the brain that override the rational brain. These reactions occur in the brains of people w...

13 Steps for Managing Emotional Flashbacks [Focus on Bold Print when flashback is active] Say to yourself: “I am having a flashback”. Flashbacks take you into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as you were in childhood.

The feelings and sensations you are experiencing are past memories that cannot hurt you now. Remind yourself: “I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present.” Remember you are now in the safety of the present, far from the danger of the past. Own your right/need to have boundaries. Remind yourself that you do not have to allow anyone to mistreat you; you are free to leave dangerous situations and protest unfair behavior. Speak reassuringly to the Inner Child. The child needs to know that you love her/him unconditionally– that s/he can come to you for comfort and protection when s/he feels lost and scared. Deconstruct eternity thinking. In childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless – a safer future was unimaginable. Remember this flashback will pass as it always has before.