Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

I felt furious that something had happened to me to give me a Pavlovian “I’m sorry” response.

As I free-associated on this 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.

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 toddler who bypasses the adaptation of the flight defense may drift into developing the freeze response and become the “lost child.” This child escapes his fear by slipping more and more deeply into dissociation. He learns to let his parents’ verbal and emotional abuse “go in one ear and out the other.” It is not uncommon for this type to devolve in adolescence into the numbing substance addictions of pot, alcohol, opiates and other “downers”.

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 ...

Servitude, ingratiation, and obsequiousness become important survival strategies. She cleverly forfeits all needs that might inconvenience her parents. She stops having preferences and opinions that might anger them. Boundaries of every kind are surrendered...

All this loss of self begins before the child has many words, and certainly no insight. For the budding codependent, all hints of danger soon immediately trigger servile behaviors and abdication of rights and needs.

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. Webster’s second entry for fawn is: “to show friendliness by licking hands, wagging its tail, etc.: said of a dog.” I find it tragic that some codependents are as loyal as dogs to even the worst “masters”.

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.

Sadly, the closest that the unrecovered fawn type comes to getting his needs met is vicariously through helping others.

I have this sardonic fantasy about two codependents going on their first date. Somehow they have agreed that they want to go to a movie, but how will they ever choose which one? “What do you want to see?” “Oh, I’m easy what do you want to see?” “It really doesn’t matter to me, I like everything.” ‘Me too why don’t you choose?” “Oh I think it would be much better if you pick.” “Oh I couldn’t, I never pick the right one.” “Me too, but I’m sure my pick would definitely be the worst.” And so it goes, ad infinitum, until it is too late to see any show, and relieved at not having to put themselves out there, they call it a night.

Moreover, as we know from studying the DV cycle, many narcissistic abusers know when and how to shower romantic tidbits on their victims just when they are at the point of leaving. These narcissists are often the charming bullies described in the last chapter. Their infrequent tidbits have more warmth in them than anything the codependent received at home, so she quickly becomes re-hooked, and just as quickly the cycle of abuse begins again.

I have worked a great deal with these fawn-freeze types in my years of doing telephone crisis counseling. Hope for them lies in understanding how their childhood abuse set them up for their current abuse. This is often difficult, because scapegoated fawn-freezes were often punished extra intensely for complaining.

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.

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.

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 actually wants some feedback.

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.

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. There are many codependents who realize their penchant for forfeiting themselves, but who instantly forget everything they know when self-assertion is appropriate in their relationships.

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]

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.

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 self-protection, of balanced assertiveness, and of the courage that is needed to make relationships equal and reciprocal.

To facilitate the reclaiming of assertiveness, I encourage the survivor to imagine herself confronting a current or past unfairness. This type of role-playing is often delicate work, as it can invoke a therapeutic flashback that brings up old fear. 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.

Many fawns survived by constantly focusing their awareness on their parents to figure out what was needed to appease them. Some became almost psychic in their ability to read their parents moods and expectations. This then helped them to figure out the best response to neutralize parental danger. For some, it even occasionally won them some approval.

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 ...

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

In advanced recovery, this occurs when we reduce the habit of automatically shifting our mood to match someone else’s emotional state. By this, 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. You do not have to laugh when something is not funny. When a friend is feeling bad, you do not have to act like you feel bad. When you are feeling bad, you do not have to act like you feel happy.

Here is another example of this. You are in a great mood and tell me that you loved this old musical that you just saw. I, however, am feeling down and dislike old musicals. If I were a fight type, the table would be set for a great deal of mutual alienation. If I were an unrecovered fawn type, however, I might strangle my bad mood and my musical taste, and anxiously squeeze out a high-pitched, forced frivolity about how wonderful Fred Astaire is. Instead, I can reach for a deeper more authentic truth. I can let you know that I am pleased you had such a nice time. After all, I really believe in different strokes for different folks.

I did not yet know that 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.

The importance of learning to handle and accept disapproval faded in and out of my awareness myriad times. But now as I write thirty years later, I feel it is one of the most important things I have ever learned. 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.

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.

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 who have been triggered into a 4F reaction so often, that minor events can now trigger them into a panicky state.

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. Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. [Feeling small and fragile is a sign of a flashback.] Ease back into your body. Fear launches you into “heady” worrying, or numbing and spacing out. [a] Gently ask your body to Relax: feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. [Tightened muscles send f...

A trigger is an external or internal stimulus that activates us into an emotional flashback. This often occurs on a subliminal level outside the boundaries of normal consciousness. Recognizing what triggers us can therefore be difficult.

The look, in most cases, is the facial expression that typically accompanies contempt. Contempt is a powerful punishing visage backed up by an emotional force-field of intimidation and disgust. A raised voice can be added intermittently to the look to amp up its power.

With enough pairings of the look with physical punishment or extreme abandonment, the parent can eventually delete the smack and get the same results with just the look. With enough repetitions in early childhood, this pairing can last a lifetime, so that the parent can control the child forever with the look. In my hospice work, I have seen several dying, ninety-pound mothers still able to put the fear of god into their huge sons with the look.

Unfortunately the look can continue to work even after the parent dies. There are at least two reasons for this. First, we internalize our parents in a way that they can subliminally appear in our imaginations and give us the look whenever we are less than perfect. This includes “imperfections” in thought, feeling or action. Sadly, I often see this subliminal look mimicked on the faces of my flashbacked clients as they scowl contemptuously at themselves. And second, when anyone else looks at us disapprovingly, we can generalize that they are as dangerous as our parents.

Moreover he can also, seemingly out of the blue, worry himself into a flashback by simply thinking he is not perfectly executing a task that he is undertaking. He can also frighten himself by enumerating the many ways that he might mess up any upcoming task.

We then devolve into a polarized process of negative-noticing – an incessant preoccupation with defects and hazards. We perseverate about everything that has gone or could go wrong.

One common sign of being flashed-back is that we feel small, helpless, and hopeless. In intense flashbacks this magnifies into feeling so ashamed that we are loath to go out or show our face anywhere. Feeling fragile, on edge, delicate and easily crushable is another aspect of this. The survivor may also notice an evaporation of whatever self-esteem he has earned since he left home. This is a flashback to the childhood years where implicit family rules forbade any self-esteem at all.

Another common clue that we are flashing back is an increase in the virulence of the inner or outer critic. This typically looks like increased drasticizing and catastrophizing, as well as intensified self-criticism or judgmentalness of others. A very common example of this is lapsing into extremely polarized, all-or-none thinking such as only being able to see what is wrong with yourself and/or others.

Another clue that we are in a flashback occurs when we notice that our emotional reactions are out of proportion to what has triggered them. Here are two common instances of this: [1] a minor upset feels like an emergency; [2] a minor unfairness feels like a travesty of justice.

Another clue about being in a flashback is an increased use of primitive self-soothing techniques. Many survivors learn early in life to manage their painful feelings with food, distracting activities or mood-altering substances. Over time self-medication can become habitual and devolve into substance or process addictions.

I recently experienced this with a client who rushed into my office five minutes late, visibly flushed and anxious. She opened the session by exclaiming: “I’m such a loser. I can’t do anything right. You must be sick of working with me.” This was someone who had, on previous occasions, been moved by my validation of her ongoing accomplishments in our work.

Based on what she had uncovered about her mother’s punitive perfectionism in previous sessions, I was certain that being late had triggered her into an emotional flashback. In this moment, she was experiencing right-brain emotional dominance and a decrease in left-brain rational thinking. As so often happens in a flashback, she temporarily lost access to her post-childhood knowledge and understanding. This appears to be a mechanism of dissociation, and in this instance, it rendered my client amnesiac of my high regard for our work together.

As we progress in our recovery, we learn that flashbacks can cause us to forget that our proven allies are in fact still reliable. With enough practice, however, we can learn to interpret feelings of distrust with proven friends as evidence that we are in a flashback. We are flashing back to our childhoods when no one was trustworthy.