Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

Those who cannot feel their sadness often do not know when they are being unfairly excluded, and those who cannot feel their normal angry or fearful responses to abuse, are often in danger of putting up with it without protest.

Because of the deadly one-two punch of familial and societal attacks on our emotional selves, we need to recover our innate emotional intelligence. This is also deeply important because, as Carl Jung emphasized, our emotions tell us what is really important to us. When our emotional intelligence is restricted, we often do not know what we really want, and can consequently struggle mightily with even the smallest decisions.

The worst thing that can happen to a child is to be unwelcomed in his family of origin - to never feel included.

Good enough parents provide generous amounts of support, protection and comforting. They also guide their children to deal constructively with recurring existential difficulties such as loss, real villains, painful world events and normal disappointments with friends and family. Most importantly, they model how disappointments with intimates can be repaired. A key way they do this is to easily forgive their children for normal mistakes and shortcomings. Children who receive good enough parenting easily recognize and protect themselves from bullying and exploitive people because they do not have to become accustomed to being treated unfairly.

children who are traumatically abandoned naturally turn to food for comfort. Food offers us our first outside source of self-soothing, and when a child is starving for love, he frequently makes food his love object. Over the years he commonly “elevates” it to the status of a drug.

Dogs and cats can be a tremendous source of what Carl Rogers describes as the “unconditional positive regard” that young children must have in order to thrive. Other therapeutic relational sources include nature, music and the arts. Moreover, for some survivors, authors of helpful books can be kept at safe distances while they contribute to your healing.

Many therapists see Cptsd as an attachment disorder. This means that as a child the survivor grew up without a safe adult to healthily bond with. As bears repeating, Cptsd almost always has emotional neglect at its core. A key outcome of this is that the child has no one in his formative years who models the relational skills that are necessary to create intimacy.

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.

intimacy does not mean unconditional love. As John Gottman’s scholarly research shows, a certain amount of disagreement, disaffection and disappointment is normal in relationship. The hallmark of successful couples is their ability to handle feelings of anger and hurt in a constructive and civil way.

Enlightened parents introduce limits slowly but surely. They do it at such a rate that by the time the child reaches adolescence he can balance satisfying his needs with helping his intimates to satisfy theirs. He learns to be sharing and reciprocal, a developmental task that is essential to keeping intimacy alive in his life.

In Cptsd-engendering families, the absence of care and concern is extreme. A caretaker is rarely or never available for support, comfort or protection. If this is what you suffered, you then grew up feeling that no one likes you. No one ever listened to you or seemed to want you around. No one had empathy for you, showed you warmth, or invited closeness. No one cared about what you thought, felt, did, wanted or dreamed of. You learned early that, no matter how hurt, alienated, or terrified you were, turning to a parent would do nothing more than exacerbate your experience of rejection.

Emotional neglect, alone, causes children to abandon themselves, and to give up on the formation of a self. They do so to preserve an illusion of connection with the parent and to protect themselves from the danger of losing that tenuous connection. This typically requires a great deal of self-abdication, e.g., the forfeiture of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-care, self-interest, and self-protection.

Many freeze types hide away in their rooms and reveries fully convinced that the world of relating holds nothing for them. Freeze type who have not been totally turned off relationships by horrible childhood neglect or abuse, gravitate to online relationships. Online relating can be pursued safely at home with as little contact as desired. Many fawn types avoid emotional investment and potential disappointment by barely showing themselves. They hide behind their helpful personas and over-listen, over-elicit and/or overdo for the other. By over-focusing on their partners, they then do not have to risk real self-exposure and the possibility of deeper level rejection.

If you are a freeze type, you may seek refuge and comfort by dissociating in prolonged bouts of sleep, daydreaming, wishing and right-brain-dominant activities like TV, online browsing and video games. Freeze types sometimes have or appear to have Attention Deficit Disorder [ADD]. They often master the art of changing the internal channel whenever inner experience becomes uncomfortable. When they are especially traumatized or triggered, they may exhibit a schizoid-like detachment from ordinary reality.

Several of my freeze type respondents highly recommend a self-help book by Suzette Boon, entitled Coping with Trauma-related Dissociation. This book is filled with very helpful work sheets that are powerful tools for recovering.

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. The disenfranchisement of the fawn type begins in childhood. She learns early that a modicum of safety and attachment can be gained by becoming the helpful and compliant servant of her exploitive parents.

The narcissist reverses the parent-child relationship. The child is parentified and takes care of the needs of the parent, who acts like a needy and sometimes tantruming child. When this occurs, the child may be turned into the parent’s confidant, substitute spouse, coach, or housekeeper.

Pressing a child into codependent service usually involves scaring and shaming him out of developing a sense of self.

Fawn types typically respond to psychoeducation about the 4F’s with great relief. This eventually helps them to recognize the repetition compulsion that draws them to narcissistic types who exploit them. The codependent needs to understand how she gives herself away by over-listening to others. Recovery involves shrinking her characteristic listening defense, as well as practicing and broadening her verbal and emotional self-expression.

The flight-freeze type avoids potential relationship-retraumati-zation with an obsessive-compulsive/dissociative “two-step.” Step one is working to complete exhaustion. Step two is collapsing into extreme “veging out”, and waiting until his energy reaccumulates enough to relaunch into step one. The price for this type of no-longer-necessary safety is a severely narrowed existence. The flight-freeze cul-de-sac is more common among men, especially those traumatized for being vulnerable in childhood. This then drives them to seek safety in isolation or “intimacy-lite” relationships.

Flight-freeze types are the computer addicts who focus on work for long periods of time and then drift off dissociatively into computer games, substance abuse or sleep-bingeing.

As a toddler, the codependent learns quickly that protesting abuse leads to even more frightening parental retaliation. Thus she responds by relinquishing her fight response, deleting “no” from her vocabulary and never developing the language skills of healthy assertiveness. Moreover, many abusive parents reserve their most harsh punishments for “talking back”, and hence ruthlessly extinguish the fight response in their children.

The toddler who bypasses the adaptation of the flight defense may drift into developing the freeze response and become the “lost child.” This child escapes his fear by slipping more and more deeply into dissociation. He learns to let his parents’ verbal and emotional abuse “go in one ear and out the other.” It is not uncommon for this type to devolve in adolescence into the numbing substance addictions of pot, alcohol, opiates and other “downers”. The future codependent toddler, however, wisely gives up on the fight, flight and freeze responses. Instead she learns to fawn her way into the occasional safety of being perceived as helpful. It bears repeating that the fawn type is often one of the gifted children that Alice Miller writes about in The Drama Of The Gifted Child. She is the precocious one who discovers that a modicum of safety can be purchased by becoming variously useful to her parent. Servitude, ingratiation, and obsequiousness become important survival strategies. She cleverly forfeits all needs that might inconvenience her parents. She stops having preferences and opinions that might anger them. Boundaries of every kind are surrendered to mollify her parents, who repudiate their duty of caring for her. As we saw in the last chapter, she is often parentified and becomes as thoroughly helpful to the parent as she can.

In conversations, codependents seek safety and acceptance in relationship through listening and eliciting. They invite the other to talk rather than risk exposing their thoughts, views, and feelings. They ask questions to keep the attention off themselves, because their parents taught them that talking was dangerous and that their words were indictments that would inevitably prove them guilty of being unworthy. The implicit code of the fawn type is that it is safer [1] to listen than to talk, [2] to agree than to dissent, [3] to offer care than to ask for help, [4] to elicit the other than to express yourself and [5] to leave choices to the other rather than to express preferences. Sadly, the closest that the unrecovered fawn type comes to getting his needs met is vicariously through helping others.

Many fawn-freeze types only make token efforts at recovery, if they do not avoid it altogether. Often fawn-freezes were forced to so thoroughly abandon their protective instincts that they become trapped in what psychologists call learned helplessness.

Fawn-Flight: Super Nurse The fawn-flight type is most typically seen in the busyholic parent, nurse or administrative assistant who works from dawn until bedtime providing for the needs of the household, hospital or company. He compulsively takes care of everyone else’s needs with hardly a gesture toward his own. The fawn-flight is sometimes a misguided Mother Teresa type, who escapes the pain of her self-abandonment by seeing herself as the perfect, selfless caregiver. She further distances herself from her own pain by obsessive-compulsively rushing from one person in need to another.

The above also relates to allowing others to be imperfect. We all have minor limitations and foibles that may not be transformable. Loved ones need to be spared from being pressured to fix what is unfixable. My way of approaching this is to always frame my advice as take-it or leave-it. To prove this is so, I refrain from then going on about it repetitively. Additionally, I typically check in first to see if the other person actually wants some feedback.

Survivors now need to deconstruct this habit by working to stay more inside their own experience without constantly projecting their attention outward to read others. Fawn-types who are still habituated to people-pleasing, must work on reducing their ingratiating behaviors. I have noticed over the years that the degree to which a survivor strains to please me reflects the degree to which his parents were dangerous. Recovering requires us to become increasingly mindful of our automatic matching and mirroring behaviors. This helps us decrease the habit of reflexively agreeing with everything that anyone says. It is a great accomplishment to significantly reduce verbal matching. It is an even more powerful achievement to reduce inauthentic emotional mirroring. Dysfunctional emotional matching is seen in behaviors such as acting amused at destructive sarcasm, acting loving when someone is punishing, and acting forgiving when someone is repetitively hurtful.

The inner critic has its own version of excessive honesty which I sometimes call “beating you to the punch.” Afraid of being criticized [as in childhood], the inner critic can launch the survivor into a “confession” of her every defect in hopes of short-circuiting anyone else from bringing them up. Sometimes hearing the criticism from yourself feels less hurtful than hearing it from someone else. After all, it’s old news to you and your critic.

Here are the key types of parental nurturing that all children need in order to flourish. Knowing about these unmet needs can help you to grieve out the unreleased pain that comes from having grown up without this type of support. Moreover, this knowledge can guide you to reparent and interact with yourself more nurturingly. 1. VERBAL NURTURANCE: Eager participation in multidimensional conversation. Generous amounts of praise and positive feedback. Willingness to entertain all questions. Teaching, reading stories, providing resources for ongoing verbal development. 2. SPIRITUAL NURTURANCE: Seeing and reflecting back to the child his or her essential worth, basic goodness and loving nature. Engendering experiences of joy, fun, and love to maintain the child’s innate sense that life is a gift. Spiritual or philosophical guidance to help the child integrate painful aspects of life. Nurturing the child’s creative self-expression. Frequent exposure to nature. 3. EMOTIONAL NURTURANCE: Meeting the child consistently with caring, regard and interest. Welcoming and valuing the child’s full emotional expression. Modeling non-abusive expression of emotions. Teaching safe ways to release anger that do not hurt the child or others. Generous amounts of love, warmth, tenderness, and compassion. Honoring tears as a way of releasing hurt. Being a safe refuge. Humor. 4. PHYSICAL NURTURANCE: Affection and protection. Healthy diet and sleep schedule. Teaching habits of grooming, discipline, a...

These losses have to be grieved until the person really gets how much her caretakers were not caretakers, and how much her parents were not her allies. She needs to grieve until she stops blaming herself for their abuse and/or neglect. She needs to grieve until she fully realizes that their abysmal parenting practices gave her that awful gift that keeps on giving: Cptsd. She needs to grieve until she understands how her learned habit of automatic self-abandonment is a reenactment of their abject failure to be there for her. Mourning these awful realities empowers our efforts to develop a multidimensional practice of self-care. As we grieve more effectively, our capacities for self-compassion and self-protection grow, and our psyche becomes increasingly user friendly.