Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

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.