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Kindle Notes & Highlights
When caretakers turn their backs on a child’s need for help and support, her inner world becomes an increasingly
nightmarish amalgam of fear, shame and depression. The child who is abandoned in this way experiences the world as a terrifying place.
For many survivors, authority figures are the ultimate triggers.
In my own mid-level recovery, I learned that when I was feeling especially judgmental of others, it usually meant that I had flashed back to being around my critical parents.
Recovering requires being able to recognize inner-critic catastrophizing so that we can resist it with thought-stopping and thought-correction.
Once again, the superego is the part of the psyche that learns parental rules in order to gain their acceptance.
The inner critic is the superego gone bad. The inner critic is the superego in overdrive desperately trying to win your parents’ approval.
The critic-driven child can only think about the ways she is too much or not enough. The child’s unfolding sense of self [the healthy ego], finds no room to develop. Her identity virtually becomes the critic. The superego trumps the ego.
Key childhood losses - addressed throughout this book - are all the crucial developmental arrests that we suffered. The most essential of these are the deaths of our self-compassion and our self-esteem, as well as our abilities to protect ourselves and fully express ourselves.
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.
Dysfunctional parents typically reserve their worst punishments for their child’s anger. This then traps the child’s anger inside.
Fear drives the toxic inner critic. The critic feeds off fear and flashes the survivor back to the frightening times of childhood.
It appears that children are hard-wired to release fear through angering and crying.
Although sensations of fear sometimes feel unbearable at first, persistent focusing with non-reactive attention dissolves and resolves them as if awareness itself is digesting and integrating them.
