Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

While the origin of Cptsd is most often associated with extended periods of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood, my observations convince me that ongoing verbal and emotional abuse also causes it.

Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves and children who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness

Trauma occurs when attack or abandonment triggers a fight/flight response so intensely that the person cannot turn it off once the threat is over. He becomes stuck in an adrenalized state. His sympathetic nervous system is locked “on” and he cannot toggle into the relaxation function of the parasympathetic nervous system.

A flight response is triggered when a person responds to a perceived threat by fleeing, or symbolically, by launching into hyperactivity. A freeze response is triggered when a person, realizing resistance is futile, gives up, numbs out into dissociation and/or collapses as if accepting the inevitability of being hurt.

Traumatized children often over-gravitate to one of these response patterns to survive, and as time passes these four modes become elaborated into entrenched defensive structures that are similar to narcissistic [fight], obsessive/compulsive [flight], dissociative [freeze] or codependent [fawn] defenses.

I find it helpful to approach developmental arrests from the viewpoint of novelist David Mitchell’s quip that “…fire is the sun unwinding itself out of the wood”. Similarly, effective recovery is unwinding the natural potential you were born with out of your unconscious.

Early abuse and abandonment forces the child to merge his identity with the superego, the part of the child’s brain that learns the rules of his caretakers in order to get and maintain acceptance. However, because acceptance is impossible in the Cptsd-engendering family, the superego gets stuck working overtime to achieve the impossible. Perseverating on finding a formula to win over her parents, the child eventually embraces perfectionism as a strategy to make her parents less dangerous and more engaging. Her one hope is that if she becomes smart, helpful, pretty, and flawless enough, her parents will finally care for her. Sadly, continued failure at winning their regard forces her to conclude that she is fatally flawed.

Cognitive tools are irreplaceable in healing cognitive issues, but they do not address all the levels of our wounding.

repression of one end of the emotional continuum often leads to a repression of the whole continuum, and the person becomes emotionally deadened. The baby of emotional vitality is thrown out with the bathwater of some unacceptable feeling.

The repression of the so-called negative polarities of emotion causes much unnecessary pain, as well as the loss of many essential aspects of the feeling nature. In fact, much of the plethora of loneliness, alienation, and addictive distraction that plagues modern industrial societies is a result of people being taught and forced to reject, pathologize or punish so many of their own and others’ normal feeling states.

while it may be fairly easy to like yourself when feelings of love or happiness or serenity are present, deeper psychological health is seen only when you can maintain a posture of self-love and self-respect in the times of emotional hurt that accompany life’s inevitable contingencies of loss, loneliness, confusion, uncontrollable unfairness, and accidental mistake.

Most traumatizing parents are especially contemptuous towards the child’s expression of emotional pain. This contempt then forces the child’s all-important capacity for healthy grieving into developmental arrest. One archetypal example of this is seen in the parent who hurts his child to the point of tears, and then has the nerve to say: “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!”

The rejecting responses of our parents to our emotional expression alienate us from our feelings. Emotional abuse/neglect scares us out of our own emotions while simultaneously making us terrified of other people’s feelings. John Bradshaw describes the devastation of the child’s emotional nature as “soul murder”. He explains this as involving a process where the child’s emotional expression [his first language of self-expression] is so assaulted with disgust that any emotional experience immediately devolves into toxic shame.

Grieving is the key process for reconnecting with our repressed emotional intelligence. Grieving reconnects us with our full complement of feelings. Grieving is necessary to help us release and work through our pain about the terrible losses of our childhoods.

Grieving restores our crucial, developmentally arrested capacity to verbally ventilate. Verbal ventilation is the penultimate grieving practice. It is speaking from your feelings in a way that releases and resolves your emotional distress.

Other survivors have spiritual experiences of belonging to something greater and worthwhile by being in nature, by listening to music or by appreciating the arts.

A numinous experience is a powerful moving feeling of well being accompanied by a sense that there is a positive, benign force behind the universe, as well as within yourself. This in turn sometimes brings enough grace with it, that you have a profound feeling that you are essentially worthwhile, that you belong in this life, and that life is a gift.

When developing children receive “good enough parenting”, they feel that life is a gift even though it typically comes with difficult and painful experiences.

some somatic repair happens automatically when we reduce our physiological stress by more efficient flashback management. Particularly potent help also comes from the grieving work of reclaiming the ability to cry self-compassionately and to express anger self-protectively.

Regular systematic stretching of the body’s major muscle groups can help you to reduce the armoring that occurs when your 4F response is chronically triggered.

Yoga, massage, meditation and relaxation training are formalized disciplines to aid in letting go of unnecessary body tension.

it is my opinion that techniques like EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing] and Somatic Experiencing are very powerful tools for stress-reduction. They are especially helpful in resolving simple ptsd. However, they are not complete Cptsd therapies, unless the practitioner is eclectic enough to be incorporating inner critic and grieving-the-losses-of-childhood work.

A central aspect of the truly helpful relational work was what John Bradshaw called “healing the shame that binds.” I believe toxic shame cannot be healed without some relational help.

These clients gradually learned to live more successfully on their own without their parents over-controlling spoiling influence.

The hallmark of successful couples is their ability to handle feelings of anger and hurt in a constructive and civil way.

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-fathering aims at building assertiveness and self-protection. It includes learning to effectively confront external and/or internal abuse, as well as standing up for the adult child’s rights,

many survivors instinctively initiate reparenting by others, via entering what one of my clients describes as “the community of books”. They receive reparenting from authors who encourage them to value and support themselves.

In advanced recovery, self-help and relational-help blend in an all important Tao. A Tao is a yin/yang combination of opposite and complementary forces. The Tao of relational recovery involves balancing healthy independence with healthy dependence on others.

Advanced recovery also correlates with letting go of the salvation fantasy that you will never have another flashback.

recovery is gradual and frequently a backwards and forwards process.

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.

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. Here are some examples of this that I believe are conducive to both recovery and healthy everyday living: voluntary simplicity, improved diet, meditation, alternative medicine, broad scale compassion, environmentalism, deeper emotional communication and a broader use of the grieving process.

Many “normal” people strive to fulfill the pursuit of happiness as if it were a patriotic duty.

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.

Self-compassionate crying is an unparalleled tool for shrinking the obsessive perseverations of the critic, and for ameliorating the habit of compulsive rushing. As her recovery progresses, the flight type can acquire a “gearbox” that allows her to engage life at a variety of speeds, including neutral. Neutral is especially important for flight types to cultivate.

the flight type can rescue himself from panicky flight by inverting an old cliché into: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” And, by stand there I mean stop and take some time to become centered - and to re-prioritize. To accomplish this I recommend three minute, mini-chair meditations. If you are a flight type, you can enhance your recovery greatly by giving yourself a few of these each day. You can start a chair meditation by closing your eyes. Gently ask your body to relax. Feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. Breathe deeply and slowly.

When you have relaxed your muscles and deepened and slowed your breathing, ask yourself: “What is my most important priority right now? What is the most beneficial thing I can do next?” As you get more proficient at this and can manage sitting for a longer time, try the question: “What hurt am I running from right now? Can I open my heart to the idea and image of soothing myself in my pain?”

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.

Maria

I have met with fight-freeze types a few times in similar circumstances, i.e., they were dragged into therapy under the threat of divorce. Each was like the character in the famous poem: “The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table.” 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. The fight-freeze type is a John Wayne couch potato, dominating family life with foul moods and monosyllabic grunts and curses.

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.

I now experience most disapproval with considerable equanimity. 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.

Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment. Validate and soothe your child’s past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn your tears into self-compassion and your anger into self-protection.

Real recovery is a gradually progressive process [often two steps forward, one step back], not an attained salvation fantasy. Don’t beat yourself up for having a flashback.

For many survivors, authority figures are the ultimate triggers.

With self-medication, I believe there is a continuum of severity that stretches from occasional use on one end to true addiction on the other. For many survivors, self-medication is a matter of degree. An especially strong urge to use more substance or process than normal is a powerful clue that you are in a flashback. With practice, mindfully noticing a sudden upsurge in craving can be interpreted as the need to invoke the flashback management steps. Moreover, I see many survivors gradually decrease their self-medicating habits by effectively using these steps.

When your recovery matures sufficiently, you realize that much of the emotional pain of your flashbacks is appropriate but delayed reactions to your childhood abuse and neglect.

The cruel, totalitarian inner critic is a key distinguishing feature of Cptsd.

I do not have to be perfect to be safe or loved in the present.

I cannot change the past. I forgive all my past mistakes.