Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

I will substitute the words “want to” for “should” and only follow this imperative if it feels like I want to, unless I am under legal, ethical or moral obligation.

Right now, I notice, visualize and enumerate my accomplishments, talents and qualities, as well as the many gifts that life offers me, e.g., nature, music, film, food, beauty, color, friends, pets, etc.

There is an invisible social context to toxic shame attacks. Toxic shame is social because the inner critic came into existence through pathological interactions with our parents.

“Shame is blame turned against the self”.

I encourage you to write out a list of your positive qualities and accomplishments to read it to yourself if you get lost in self-hate.

You can cultivate a perspective that is open to noticing what there is to be grateful about as long as you do not do it with the intention of creating a permanent feeling of gratitude. Over time an attitude of gratitude can gradually increase authentic gratefulness.

Our recovering depends on us using mindfulness to decrease our habits of dissociation.

We grieve the losses of childhood because these losses are like deaths of important parts of ourselves. Effective grieving brings these parts back to life. In this chapter we describe the healing that is available through the four practices of grieving: angering, crying, verbal ventilating and feeling.

A survivor can learn to grieve himself out of fear - the death of feeling safe. He can learn to grieve himself out of shame - the death of feeling worthy. He can learn to grieve himself out of depression - the death of feeling fully alive.

Angering is the grieving technique of aggressively complaining about current or past losses and injustices. Survivors need to anger - sometimes rage - about the intimidation, humiliation and neglect that was passed off to them as nurturance in their childhoods.

Crying is also an irreplaceable tool for cutting off the critic’s emotional fuel supply. Tears can release fear before it devolves into frightened and frightening thinking.

If you are unable cry or feel angry, focusing on your breath may help you to emote. This is especially true if you attend to the sensations in your abdominal region as it expands and contracts during respiration.

Left-brain dissociation is obsessiveness. Commonly, this ranges in severity from dwelling on a singular worry… to repetitively cycling through a list of worries… to panicky drasticizing and catastrophizing. This type of dissociation from internal pain strands the survivor in unhelpful ruminations about issues that are unrelated or minimally related to the true nature of her suffering.

Mutual commiseration is the process in which two intimates are reciprocally sympathetic to each other’s troubles and difficulties. It is the deepest most intimate channel to intimacy – profounder than sex.

“Feeling is the antithesis of pain…the more pain one feels, the less pain one suffers” – Arthur Janov

Feeling is a subtler, passive process than emoting. It is best illustrated by contrasting the concepts of emoting and feeling. Emoting is when we cry, anger out, or verbally ventilate the energy of an inner emotional experience. Feeling, on the other hand, is the inactive process of staying present to internal emotional experience without reacting.

Feeling is a kinesthetic rather than a cognitive experience. It is the process of shifting the focus of your awareness off of thinking and onto your affects, energetic states and sensations. It is the proverbial “getting out of your head” and “getting into your body.”

Healing progresses when we learn to distinguish depressed thinking [which we need to eliminate] from depressed feeling [which we sometimes need to feel].

Feelings of abandonment commonly masquerade as the physiological sensations of hunger.

The Flight/Obsessive-compulsive type sometimes presents as being more dialogical than other types. Like the freeze type, however, he can obsess about “safe” abstract concerns that are quite removed from his deeper issues. It is therefore up to the therapist to steer him into his deeper, emotionally based concerns to help him learn a more intimacy-enhancing dialogicality.

I believe most people, if they think about it, realize that their best friends are those with whom they have had a conflict and found a way to work through it. Once a friendship survives a hurtful misattunement, it generally means that it has moved through the fair-weather-friends stage of relationship.

www.ascasupport.org for survivors of childhood abuse in general.

Active listening is based on an attitude of “unconditional positive regard”. It enhances the counselee’s process of full verbal ventilation, and it uses non-directive, non-intrusive verbal feedback to let the counselee know that you are attuned and paying attention to him/her.

Shame and self-hate did not start with me, but with all my heart, I deign that they will stop with me. I will do unto myself as I would have others do unto me.

Bibliotherapy is a term that describes the very real process of being positively and therapeutically influenced by what you read. As stated earlier, when it is at its most powerful, bibliotherapy is also relationally healing. It can rescue you from the common Cptsd feeling of abject isolation and alienation.

I am a human being not a human doing. I will not choose to be perpetually productive. I am more productive in the long run, when I balance work with play and relaxation. I will not try to perform at 100% all the time. I subscribe to the normalcy of vacillating along a continuum of efficiency.

I am reducing procrastination by reminding myself not to accept unfair criticism or perfectionist expectations from anyone. Even when afraid, I will defend myself from unfair criticism. I won’t let fear make my decisions.

The composition of most conflicts that I witness in my office eventually seems to be approximately 90% re-experienced pain from the past and 10% actual current pain.