Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

When inward tenderness Finds the secret hurt, Pain itself will crack the rock And, Ah! Let the soul emerge. — Rumi

If the child has learned through experience that he can come to at least one of his parents when he is hurting, frightened or needing help, he will tell mom or dad about it. With them, he will grieve the temporary death of his sense of safety in the world by verbally ventilating, crying and angering about it [chapter 11 expands on these processes of grieving]. Moreover, his parent will report the bully and take steps to assure that it will not happen again, and the child will typically be released from the trauma. He will naturally relax back into the safety of parasympathetic nervous system functioning. “Simple”, one incident

For me, total abandonment.

When the trauma however is repetitive and ongoing and no help is available, the child may become so frozen in trauma that the symptoms of “simple” ptsd begin to set in. This can also occur during the prolonged trauma of combat or entrapment in a cult or domestic violence situation. If however, a person is also afflicted by ongoing family abuse or profound emotional abandonment, the trauma will manifest as a particularly severe emotional flashback because he already has Cptsd. This is particularly true when his parent is also a bully. The Four F’s: Fight, Flight,

Total emotional abandonment

In especially dysfunctional families like Carol’s, the scapegoating parent often organizes the rest of the family to also gang up on the scapegoat.