Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

These clients gradually learned to live more successfully on their own without their parents over-controlling spoiling influence. Their ability to build self-nurturing relationships with themselves almost always correlated with a major reduction or complete severing of their relationships with their parents.

chapter 10 provides guidance for deconstructing this intimacy-destroying habit. In this vein, it is important to note that intimacy does not mean unconditional love. As John Gottman’s scholarly research shows, a certain amount of disagreement, disaffection and disappointment is normal in relationship. The hallmark of successful couples is their ability to handle feelings of anger and hurt in a constructive and civil way. Gottman’s studies have identified this as a key characteristic of couples who still really like each other after ten years.

Reparenting is a key aspect of relational healing. It is primarily a process of addressing the many developmentally arrested needs of the traumatized child that we were.

An important, yin/yang dynamic of reparenting involves balancing self-mothering and self-fathering. When a child’s mothering needs are adequately met, self-compassion is installed at the core of her being. When the same is true of her fathering needs, self-protection also becomes deeply imbedded. Self-compassion is the domicile of recovery, and self-protection is its foundation. When self-compassion is sufficiently established as a “home base” to return to in difficult times, an urge to be self-protective naturally arises from it. Living in the world without access to these primal instincts of survival is truly terrifying. We advance our recovery process immeasurably when we commit to re-mothering and re-fathering ourselves. I encourage you now to commit to becoming an unshakeable source of compassion and protection for yourself.

The most essential task of self-mothering is building a deeply felt sense that we are lovable and deserve to be loved. Self-mothering is the practice of loving and accepting the inner child in all phases of his mental, emotional, and physical experience.

Self-mothering is based on the precept that unconditional love is every child’s birthright.

Cptsd is a syndrome of the dearth of unconditional love, or what the great therapist, Carl Rogers, called “unconditional positive regard”. Cptsd can also occur when unconditional love is shut off in an all-or-nothing way in early childhood.

The terrible absence of love - or its abrupt premature termination - is extremely painful and its loss is very difficult to address. We cannot help desperately wanting the unconditional love we were so unfairly deprived of, but we cannot, as adults, expect others to supply our unmet early entitlement needs.

We survivors often struggle with managing our understandable but unrealistic yearnings to receive permanent unconditional love from a friend or partner. Like the toddler, we eventually have to accept the limits of adult love.

As mother to ourselves, we commit to increasing our self-compassion and unconditional positive regard. Self-mothering is a resolute refusal to indulge in self-hatred and self-abandonment. It proceeds from the realization that self-punishment is counterproductive. It is enhanced by the understanding that patience and self-encouragement are more effective than self-judgment and self-rejection in achieving recovery.

While self-mothering focuses primarily on healing the wounds of neglect, self-fathering heals the wounds of being helpless to protect yourself from parental abuse, and by extension from other abusive authority figures.

I remind him that he in fact lives in the present with me now, where I will always do my best to protect him. We now have a powerful body, greater skills of self-protection and access to allies and a legal system that will protect us.

When the recoveree consistently welcomes his inner child in every aspect of his being, the child feels increasingly safe and becomes more and more alive and self-expressive. As he experiences his adult self consistently rising to his defense, he will feel safe enough to begin accessing his innate vitality, playfulness, curiosity, and spontaneity.

Reparenting at its best is a yin/yang dynamic that balances the mutually enhancing processes of reparenting by others and self-reparenting. Reparenting sometimes needs to be initiated and modeled by someone else, such as a therapist, a sponsor, a kind friend or supportive group to show us how to self-reparent ourselves.

I too went through a long gradual process of reading and attending lectures before I was able to take the frightening and embarrassing plunge into therapy, where, as stated earlier, I was fortunate enough to find a good enough therapist to take my relational healing to the next level. Therapy allowed me to internalize and mimic my therapists’ consistent and reliable stance of being on my side. This in turn led me to gravitate toward safer and more truly intimate friendships.

I believe the need to have mothering- and fathering-type support from others is a lifelong need and not just limited to childhood. Fortunately I am now blessed many years later to experience a multileveled form of reparenting by others which I call reparenting by committee. I conceptualize reparenting by committee as a circle of friends that has varying layers and levels of intimacy. The inner circle of my reparenting committee includes my five closest friends.

For the survivor, this therapeutic synthesis can come into being when an improved supportive relationship with yourself allows you to choose and open to a helpful relationship. Sometimes simultaneously, the attainment of a safe, supportive relationship with another person promotes the growth of your ability to be self-supportive. This then rewards you with a decrease in your automatic tendency toward self-abandonment. Complementarily, this then fosters the gradual development of community – the vital life resource that you were so unfairly deprived of in childhood. The more self-supportive we become the more we attract supportive others. The more we are supported by others, the more we can support ourselves. Sometimes we get initiated into this dynamic Tao by our own efforts - sometimes by the grace of finding a supportive friend or professional helper. For many of us survivors a considerable amount of self-help work has to take place before we are able to open to relational support – before we become discerning enough to choose truly safe and helpful support.

Another key sign of recovering is that your critic begins to shrink and lose its dominance over your psyche. As it shrinks, your user-friendly ego has room to grow and to develop the kind of mindfulness that recognizes when the critic has taken over. This in turn allows you to progressively reject the 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.

Deep-level recovery is also evidenced by you becoming gradually more relaxed in safe enough company. This in turn leads to an increasing capacity to be more authentic and vulnerable in trustworthy relationships. With enough grace, this may then culminate in you acquiring an intimate, mutually supportive relationship where each of you can be there for the other through thick and thin.

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 backward processes.

Still on the cognitive level, we take our next steps into the long work of shrinking the critic. Some survivors will need to do a great deal of work on this level before they can move down to the emotional layer of work which is learning how to grieve effectively.

recovery from Cptsd is complex. Sometimes, it can feel so hopelessly complex that we totally give up and get stuck in inertia for considerable lengths of time. This is why it is so important to understand that recovery is gradual and frequently a backwards and forwards process.

Effective recovery is often limited to only progressing in one or two areas at a time. Biting off more than we can chew and trying to accomplish too much too soon is often counterproductive.

Once the critic is reduced enough that you can notice increasing periods of your brain being user-friendly, impulses to help and care for yourself naturally begin to arise. As this happens it becomes easier to tell whether you are guiding yourself with love or a whip. When you realize it’s the whip, please try to disarm your critic and treat yourself with the kindness you would extend to any young child who is struggling and having a hard time.

We also aid our recovery greatly by challenging the all-or-none thinking of the critic whenever it judges us for not being perfect in our efforts. “Progress not perfection” is a powerful mantra for guiding our self-help recovery efforts.

Moreover as recovering progresses, and especially as the critic shrinks, the desire to help yourself- to care for yourself - becomes more spontaneous. This is especially true when we mindfully do things for ourselves in a spirit of loving-kindness. As such, we can do it for the child we were – the child who was deprived through no fault of her own. And, we can do it because we believe every child, without exception, deserves loving care.

Recovery involves learning to handle unpredictable shifts in our inner emotional weather. Perhaps the ultimate dimension of this is what I call the Surviving ←→ Thriving continuum.

Before we enter into recovery, it may feel like life is nothing but a struggle to survive. However, when recovery progresses enough, we begin to have some experiences of feeling like we are thriving. These may start out as feelings of optimism, hopefulness and certainty that we are indeed recovering.

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. And if the flashback is especially intense, Thanatos may start knocking down the door. Thanatos is the death urge described by Freud and in a flashback it corresponds with the suicidal ideation

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. As mindfulness improves we can recognize suicidal ideation as evidence of a flashback and begin to rescue ourselves with the chapter 8 flashback management steps.

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. This is the territory where flashbacks morph into extended regressions. 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. This fundamental instinct of fiery willingness to defend ourselves from unfairness needs to strengthen progressively so that we can withstand inner critic attacks.

Temptations can be great at such times to revert to the less functional ways of self-soothing that we learned when we were younger. Depending on your 4F type this commonly manifests as increased eating, substance abuse, working, sleeping and/or sexually acting out.

Yet 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 further - by self-medicating to unnaturally prolong a preferred experience. At such times, we benefit most by reinvoking our intention to practice self-acceptance – by recommitting to being there for ourselves no matter where we are on the continuum.

As bears repeating, all human beings are existentially challenged to handle disappointing shifts out of thriving into surviving. We survivors however have greater difficulties handling these transitions because we were abandoned for so long at the surviving end of the continuum. Yet as our recovery progresses, we can learn to become increasingly self-supportive in times of being stuck in survival.

Some readers may work on their recovery for a long time, and erroneously and shamefully feel they are not making any progress. 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. 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.

it is important that we notice the gradually decreasing intensity of the flashback feelings of anxiety, shame and depression. In this regard, 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.

As I write this 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. 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.

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.

We can further bolster ourselves for such necessary flashbacks by comparing “speaking up” to going to the dentist for a toothache. Unless we accept the acute pain of the dentist’s therapeutic procedure, we will suffer chronic dental discomfit indefinitely. Unless we speak up, the loneliness of our silence will imprison us forever.

However, if we are ever to recover our real voice, we must sometimes invoke the energy of bravery. 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.

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 give them their shame back as disgust – the disgust any healthy adult feels when he sees a parent bullying a child with contempt, or when he sees a parent heartlessly ignoring a suffering child.”

In my opinion, 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. Examples of this include reading self-help books, attending self-improvement workshops, working at deeper self-discovery through journaling, or struggling to be more vulnerable and authentic in a therapy session or an evolving relationship. Moreover, it might be that minor flashbacks sometimes function as optimal stress. I certainly know a number of long term recoverees who seem to be evolving and becoming sharper in their old age.

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.

As stated earlier, intimacy is greatly enhanced when two people dialogue about all aspects of their experience. This is especially true when they transcend taboos against full emotional communication. 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. What an incredible achievement it is when any two of us create such an authentic and supportive relationship!

A further silver lining in recovery is the attainment of a much richer internal life. The introspective process, so fundamental to effective recovery work, eventually deepens and enriches survivors’ psyches. Ongoing mindful exploration of all aspects of our experience helps us see firsthand what Socrates meant when he said: “The unexamined life is not worth living”.

In Joseph Campbell’s words, the survivor learns to “follows his own bliss”. He is freer to pursue activities and interests that naturally appeal to him. He evolves into his own sense of style. He may even feel emboldened to coif and dress himself without adherence to the standards of fashion. He may extend this freedom into his home décor. In this vein, I have seen many survivors discover their own aesthetic, as well as an increased appreciation of beauty in general.

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. Such painful encounters can produce emotional reactions like anger, sadness, fear and depression. The average person has not learned how to verbally ventilate and metabolize their feelings about such events. This results in them getting stuck in painful emotional places, especially depression, for inordinate amounts of time.

Much of the general populace, however, becomes increasingly dissociated from their full emotional experience by anxiously pushing to pump up their mood. Many “normal” people strive to fulfill the pursuit of happiness as if it were a patriotic duty. More and more they employ socially acceptable addictions to accomplish this. Snacking, spending, self-medicating, and online puttering are widespread addictions that seem to be ever on the rise.