Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

Contagious joy is the wonderful experience of being positively triggered into vicariously sharing someone else’s authentic delight.

It appears to me that just as many children acquire Cptsd from emotionally traumatizing families as from physically traumatizing ones.

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.

De-minimization is a crucial aspect of confronting denial. It is the process by which a person deconstructs the defense of “making light” of his childhood trauma.

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.

Many survivors of verbal and emotional abuse never learn to validate its soul-damaging effects. They never accurately assign current time suffering to it. Attempts to acknowledge it are typically blindsided with thoughts that it was nothing compared to kids who were repeatedly beaten – who “had it so much worse.”

Ongoing assault with critical words systematically destroys our self-esteem and replaces it with a toxic inner critic that incessantly judges us as defective. Even worse, words that are emotionally poisoned with contempt infuse the child with fear and toxic shame. Fear and shame condition him to refrain from asking for attention, from expressing himself in ways that draw attention. Before long, he learns to refrain from seeking any kind of help or connection at all.

Unrelenting criticism, especially when it is ground in with parental rage and scorn, is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child’s brain.

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.

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.

Yet, there is no more noble recovery battle than that which gradually frees the psyche from critic dominance. Until this happens to a significant degree, there is minimal development of the healthy, user-friendly ego.

Traumatic emotional neglect occurs when a child does not have a single caretaker to whom she can turn in times of need or danger. Cptsd then sets in to the degree that there is no alternative adult [relative, older sibling, neighbor, or teacher] to turn to for comfort and protection.

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.

Emotional neglect, alone, causes children to abandon themselves, and to give up on the formation of a self. They do so to preserve an illusion of connection with the parent and to protect themselves from the danger of losing that tenuous connection. This typically requires a great deal of self-abdication, e.g., the forfeiture of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-care, self-interest, and self-protection.

Moreover, endangerment programs proliferate in the critic as the child learns that he cannot ask his parent to protect him from dangers and injustices in the outside world, never mind in the home. His only recourse is to become hypervigilant about things that can go wrong.

Unconsciously, they fear that if they momentarily “trick” someone into liking them, the forbidden prize will vanish once their social perfectionism inevitably fails and exposes their unworthiness. Moreover, when this occurs, they will be triggered even more deeply into the abandonment mélange.

The remembering and de-minimizing of the impact of emotional neglect can take a long time. It is typically an intuitive piecing together of a lot of clues. The puzzle is often solved when a critical mass of childhood reconstruction is reached. Sometimes this fosters an epiphany that neglect is indeed at the core of present time suffering. Sometimes this epiphany brings a great relieving certainty that fragile self-esteem, frequent flashbacks, and recurring reenactments of unsupportive relationships were caused by the closed hearts of your parents.

Moreover, even after considerable de-minimization of my childhood abuse/neglect picture, I was still convinced that everyone but my therapist would find me abhorrent if I shared about my flashback feelings.

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.

Finally, it is an empowering accomplishment to really get the profound significance of childhood emotional neglect. It is often flashback-resolving to realize in the moment that a flashback into bewilderment and hopelessness is an emotional reliving of your childhood trauma. Like nothing else, this can generate a self-protective impulse toward your child-self and your present-time self, kick-starting the process of resolving any given flashback.

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.

Many fight types avoid real intimacy by alienating others with their angry and controlling demands for unconditional love. This unrealistic demand to have their unmet childhood needs met destroys the possibility of intimacy. Moreover, some fight types delude themselves into believing that they are perfect. They see the other as the one who needs to be perfected. This defensive belief then entitles them to totally blame their partners for relationship problems.

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.

Fight types learn to respond to their feelings of abandonment with anger. Many use contempt, a poisonous blend of narcissistic rage and disgust, to intimidate and shame others into mirroring them. Narcissists treat others as if they are as extensions of themselves. The entitled fight type commonly uses others as an audience for his incessant monologing. He may treat a “captured” freeze or fawn type as a slave in a dominance-submission relationship. The price of admission to a relationship with an extreme narcissist is self-annihilation. One of my clients quipped: “Narcissists don’t have relationships; they take prisoners.”

I agree with the widely held notion that extreme narcissists and sociopaths are untreatable. Typically they are convinced that they themselves are perfect and that everyone else the problem.

Fight types benefit from learning to redirect their rage toward the awful childhood circumstances that caused them to adopt such an intimacy-destroying defense. This can help them to deconstruct their habits of instantly morphing abandonment feelings into rage and disgust.

Fight types need to see how their condescending, moral high-ground position alienates others and perpetuates their present time abandonment. They must renounce the illusion of their own perfection and the habit of projecting perfectionistic inner critic processes onto others. This is the work of shrinking the Outer Critic as we will see in chapter 10.

If you are a recovering fight type, it will especially benefit you to learn the empathy response of the fawn position. Begin by trying to imagine how it feels to be the person you are interacting with. Do it as much as you can. Moreover, you can expand on this by developing mindfulness about the needs, rights and feelings of those with whom you would like to have real intimacy. In early recovery you can “fake it until you make it.” For without practicing consideration for the other, and without reciprocity and dialogicality [as opposed to monologing], the intimacy you crave will allude you.

As children, flight types variably respond to their family trauma on a hyperactive continuum. The flight defense continuum stretches between the extremes of the driven “A” student and the ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder] dropout running amok. Flight types relentlessly flee the inner pain of their abandonment with the symbolic flight of constant busyness.

Left-brain dissociation is using constant thinking to distract yourself from underlying abandonment pain. When thinking is worrying, it is as if underlying fear wafts up and taints the thinking process. Moreover, if compulsivity is hurrying to stay one step ahead of your repressed pain, obsessing is worrying to stay one level above underlying pain.

Flight types are also susceptible to the process addictions of workaholism and busy-holism.

Flight types can get “stuck in their head” by being over-analytical. Once a critical mass of understanding Cptsd is achieved, it is crucial for them to start moving into their feelings. Sooner or later, they must deepen their work by grieving about their childhood losses.

Finally, there are numerous flight types who exhibit symptoms that may be misdiagnosed as Cyclothymia, a minor bipolar disorder. This issue is addressed at length in chapter 12.

If you are a freeze type, you may seek refuge and comfort by dissociating in prolonged bouts of sleep, daydreaming, wishing and right-brain-dominant activities like TV, online browsing and video games.

Freeze types sometimes have or appear to have Attention Deficit Disorder [ADD]. They often master the art of changing the internal channel whenever inner experience becomes uncomfortable.

Internal opioid release is more accessible to freeze types because the freeze response has its own continuum that culminates with the collapse response. The collapse response is an extreme abandonment of consciousness. It appears to be an out-of-body experience that is the ultimate dissociation.

The progression of recovery for a freeze type is often as follows. Gradual trust building allows the recoveree to open to psychoeducation about the role of dreadful parenting in his suffering. This then paves the way for the work of shrinking his critic, which in turn promotes the work of grieving the losses of childhood. The anger work of grieving is especially therapeutic for freeze types as is an aerobic exercise regime. Both help resuscitate the survivor’s dormant will and drive.

Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs and demands of others. They act as if they believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences and boundaries.

A fawn type/codependent is usually the child of at least one narcissistic parent. The narcissist reverses the parent-child relationship.

Some codependent children adapt by becoming entertaining. Accordingly, the child learns to be the court jester and is unofficially put in charge of keeping his parent happy. Pressing a child into codependent service usually involves scaring and shaming him out of developing a sense of self. Of all the 4F types, fawn types are the most developmentally arrested in their healthy sense of self.

Fawn types typically respond to psychoeducation about the 4F’s with great relief.

After a great deal of work, one client was shocked by how intensely he dissociated when he contemplated confronting his boss’s awful behavior.

Most trauma survivors are also hybrids of the 4F’s. Most of us have a backup response that we go to when our primary one is not effective enough. When neither of these work, we generally then have a third or fourth “go to” position.

She can frequently and dramatically vacillate [split] between a fight and fawn defense. When a fight-fawn type is upset with someone, she can fluctuate over and over between attacking diatribes and fervent declarations of caring in a single interaction.

The fight-fawn also differs from the fawn-fight in that his “care-taking” often feels coercive or manipulative. It is frequently aimed at achieving personal agendas which range from blatant to covert. Moreover, the fight-fawn rarely takes any real responsibility for contributing to an interpersonal problem. He typically ends up in the classic fight position of projecting imperfection onto the other.

Some non-alpha type male survivors combine their flight and freeze defenses to become stereotypical technology nerds. Telecommuting is, of course, their preferred mode. Flight-freeze types are the computer addicts who focus on work for long periods of time and then drift off dissociatively into computer games, substance abuse or sleep-bingeing.

The fight-freeze is a yin or passive narcissist. He demands that things go his way, but he is not much interested in having any human interaction. No one gets to talk at the table, not even him – unless of course someone needs to be put in their place.

As stated earlier, a key goal of recovery is to have easy and appropriate access to all of the 4F’s.

Healthy relating occurs when two people move easily and reciprocally between assertiveness and receptivity. Common and important examples of this are an easy back and forth [1] between talking and listening, [2] between helping and being helped, and [3] between leading and following.

A healthy relationship with yourself is seen in your ability to move in a balanced way[1] between doing and being, [2] between persistence and letting go, [3] between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation, and [4] between intense focus and relaxed, daydreamy reverie.