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Emotional flashbacks are perhaps the most noticeable and characteristic feature of Cptsd.
Overwhelming self-disdain is typically a flashback to the way he felt when suffering the contempt and visual skewering of his traumatizing parent. Toxic shame can also be created by constant parental neglect and rejection.
Many also note feeling freed from a shaming list of misdiagnoses that have been given to them by themselves or others. This in turn has aided them in ridding themselves of the self-destructive habit of amassing evidence of their own defectiveness or craziness.
Too helpless to protest or even understand the unfairness of being abused, the child eventually becomes convinced that she is defective and fatally flawed.
even though she had seemingly escaped from the family. Carol remained symbolically enthralled to the family by getting ensnared with narcissistic people who were just as abusive and neglectful as her parents. This well known psychological phenomenon is called repetition compulsion or reenactment, and trauma survivors are extremely susceptible to it.
They do this by shaming or intimidating you whenever you have a natural impulse to have sympathy for yourself, or stand up for yourself.
This is essential because without a properly functioning ego, you have no center for making healthy choices and decisions. All too often, your decisions are based on the fear of getting in trouble or getting abandoned, rather than on the principles of having meaningful and equitable interactions with the world.
inviting your instincts of self-compassion and self-protection to awaken and bloom in your life.
mindfulness is taking undistracted time to become fully aware of your thoughts and feelings so that you can have more choice in how you respond to them. Do I really agree with this thought, or have I been pressured into believing it? How do I want to respond to this feeling –
One dimension where this is most true is in the arena of healthy self-protection. For without access to our uncomfortable or painful feelings, we are deprived of the most fundamental part of our ability to notice when something is unfair, abusive, or neglectful in our environments.
the quality of our emotional intelligence is reflected in the degree to which we accept all of our feelings without automatically dissociating from them or expressing them in a way that hurts ourselves or others.
Armoring, i.e., Chronic muscle tightness
Inability to be fully present, relaxed and grounded in our bodies
Sleep problems from being over-activated
Digestive disorders from a tightened d...
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in cases of verbal and emotional abuse, our capacities to be comforted by eye- and voice-contact are undeveloped or seriously diminished.
When the developmental need to practice healthy relating with a caretaker is unmet, survivors typically struggle to find and maintain healthy supportive relationships in their adult lives.
This is despite the fact that many high functioning survivors learn to socially function quite adequately. This is particularly the case in structured situations where expectations are clear and common goals take the focus off conversing and put it on task accomplishments. Unstructured social situations however, like attending parties or just hanging out can be considerably more triggering. Spontaneous self-expression feels like the same setup for disaster that it was in childhood.
feeling compassion for someone who has suffered similarly to us sometimes naturally expands into feeling the same for ourselves.
Bob Hoffman on this topic entitled Getting Divorced from Mother & Dad.
commit to becoming an unshakeable source of compassion and protection for yourself.
Sadly, this loss can never be completely remediated, because unconditional love is only appropriate and developmentally helpful during the first two years or so of life.
We cannot help desperately wanting the unconditional love we were so unfairly deprived of, but we cannot, as adults, expect others to supply our unmet early entitlement needs.
Reparenting Affirmations I am so glad you were born. You are a good person. I love who you are and am doing my best to always be on your side. You can come to me whenever you’re feeling hurt or bad.
You do not have to be perfect to get my love and protection. All of your feelings are okay with me. I am always glad to see you. It is okay for you to be angry and I won’t let you hurt yourself or others when you are. You can make mistakes - they are your teachers. You can know what you need and ask for help. You can have your own preferences and tastes. You are a delight to my eyes. You can choose your own values. You can pick your own friends, and you don’t have to like everyone. You can sometimes feel confused and ambivalent, and not know all the answers. I am very proud of you.
The more self-supportive we become the more we attract supportive others.
whether you are guiding yourself with love or a whip. When you realize it’s the whip, please try to disarm your critic and treat yourself with the kindness you would extend to any young child who is struggling and having a hard time.
as recovering progresses, and especially as the critic shrinks, the desire to help yourself- to care for yourself - becomes more spontaneous. This is especially true when we mindfully do things for ourselves in a spirit of loving-kindness. As such, we can do it for the child we were – the child who was deprived through no fault of her own. And, we can do it because we believe every child, without exception, deserves loving care.
When we flashback, we regress to our child-mind which was incapable of imagining a future any different than the everlasting present of being so abandoned.
I give them their shame back as disgust – the disgust any healthy adult feels when he sees a parent bullying a child with contempt, or when he sees a parent heartlessly ignoring a suffering child.”
An absence of parental loving interest and engagement, especially in the first few years, creates an overwhelming emptiness.
Growing up emotionally neglected is like nearly dying of thirst outside the fenced off fountain of a parent’s warmth and interest. Emotional neglect makes children feel worthless, unlovable and excruciatingly empty. It leaves them with a hunger that gnaws deeply at the center of their being. They starve for human warmth and comfort.
Even love, coming their way, reverberates threateningly on a subliminal level.
When we are hurt, part of us is sad and part of us is mad, and no amount of angering can ever metabolize our sadness.
flight types can deteriorate into chicken-with-its-head-cut-off mode, as fear and anxiety propel them into scattered activity. Spinning their wheels, they can rush about aimlessly, as if motion itself is the only thing important.
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
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the freeze type can gravitate toward ever escalating regimens of anti-depressants and anxiolytics.
I find it tragic that some codependents are as loyal as dogs to even the worst “masters”.
Loving people when they are feeling bad is a powerful kind of caring.
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.
This is a list of 13 practical steps for helping yourself to manage an emotional flashback:
I have a right to make mistakes. Mistakes do not make me a mistake. Every mistake or mishap is an opportunity to practice loving myself in the places I have never been loved.
Micromanagement/Worrying/Obsessing/Looping/Over-Futurizing. I will not repetitively examine details over and over. I will not jump to negative conclusions. I will not endlessly second-guess myself. I cannot change the past. I forgive all my past mistakes. I cannot make the future perfectly safe. I will stop hunting for what could go wrong. I will not try to control the uncontrollable. I will not micromanage myself or others. I work in a way that is “good enough”, and I accept the existential fact that my efforts sometimes bring desired results and sometimes they do not. “God grant me the
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“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself”. - Jane Eyre
Natural anger eventually arises when we really get how little and defenseless we were when our parents bullied us into hating ourselves.
“I’m not afraid of you anymore, mom and dad. You were the critic, and you put the critic in me. I renounce your toxic messages. Take back your shame and disgust. I am disgusted at your shameful job of parenting.”
“You totally ruined my childhood, and I’m not going to let you get away with ruining my life now.”
We can fume that this occurred when we were too young to protest or even know what was happening to us.
With enough practice, we can repudiate our parents’ awful legacy of teaching us that love means numbly accepting abuse and neglect.
After you go to bed at night, list at least ten positive happenings of the day.
