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Cptsd is a more severe form of Post-traumatic stress disorder. It is delineated from this better known trauma syndrome by five of its most common and troublesome features: emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self-abandonment, a vicious inner critic and social anxiety.
When despair predominates, a sense of profound numbness, paralysis and desperation to hide may occur.
This is my typical stress/anxiety response
toxic shame.
The abandonment mélange is the fear and toxic shame that surrounds and interacts with the abandonment depression. The abandonment depression itself is the deadened feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that afflicts traumatized children.
Passive suicidality is far more common with the Cptsd survivors who I have known, and it ranges from wishing you were dead to fantasizing about ways to end your life.
renowned traumatologist, John Briere,
Some survivors have confidence but not self-esteem.
Self-criticism, then, runs non-stop in a desperate attempt to avoid rejection-inducing mistakes. Drasticizing becomes obsessive to help the child foresee and avoid punishment and worsening abandonment.
Unfortunately, Cptsd-inducing parents thwart the growth of the ego by undermining the development of the crucial egoic processes of self-compassion and self-protection. They do this by shaming or intimidating you whenever you have a natural impulse to have sympathy for yourself, or stand up for yourself. The instinct to care for yourself and to protect yourself against unfairness is then forced to become dormant.
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.
Most traumatizing parents are especially contemptuous towards the child’s expression of emotional pain. This contempt then forces the child’s all-important capacity for healthy grieving into developmental arrest.
One archetypal example of this is seen in the parent who hurts his child to the point of tears, and then has the nerve to say: “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!”
Emotional abuse/neglect scares us out of our own emotions while simultaneously making us terrified of other people’s feelings.
When I apply the concept of “good enough” to people, I generally mean that a person is essentially good hearted, tries to be fair, and meets his or her commitments a large portion of the time.
In the traumatizing family however, there is little or nothing that is good enough and hence little for which to be grateful. The child instead is forced to over-develop a critic that hyper-focuses on what is dangerously imperfect in her as well as others. This sometimes helps her to hide aspects of herself that might be punished. It may further assist her to avoid people who might be punishing.
Here are some of the most common examples of body-harming reactions to Cptsd stress: Hypervigilance Shallow and Incomplete Breathing
Sleep problems from being over-activated
in cases of verbal and emotional abuse, our capacities to be comforted by eye- and voice-contact are undeveloped or seriously diminished.
it is important to note that 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. Gottman’s studies have identified this as a key characteristic of couples who still really like each other after ten years.
When a child’s mothering needs are adequately met, self-compassion is installed at the core of her being. When the same is true of her fathering needs, self-protection also becomes deeply imbedded.
Self-mothering is the practice of loving and accepting the inner child in all phases of his mental, emotional, and physical experience.
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
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Self-fathering aims at building assertiveness and self-protection. It includes learning to effectively confront external and/or internal abuse, as well as standing up for the adult child’s rights,
Another key sign of recovering is that your critic begins to shrink and lose its dominance over your psyche. As it shrinks, your user-friendly ego has room to grow and to develop the kind of mindfulness that recognizes when the critic has taken over. This in turn allows you to progressively reject the critic’s perfectionistic and drasticizing processes. More and more, you stop persecuting yourself for normal foibles. Additionally, you perseverate less in disappointment about other people’s minor miscues.
Deep-level recovery is also evidenced by you becoming gradually more relaxed in safe enough company. This in turn leads to an increasing capacity to be more authentic and vulnerable in trustworthy relationships. With enough grace, this may then culminate in you acquiring an intimate, mutually supportive relationship where each of you can be there for the other
The Stages Of Recovering
“Progress not perfection” is a powerful mantra for guiding our self-help recovery efforts.
Some readers may work on their recovery for a long time, and erroneously and shamefully feel they are not making any progress. Because of the all-or-none thinking that typically accompanies Cptsd, survivors in the early stages of recovery often fail to notice or validate their own actual progress. If we do not notice the degrees of our own improvement in our recovery work, we are in great danger of giving up on recovering.
As I write this I feel some old sadness about the many decades that I judged my emotional tone and mood as either good or bad in a very all-or-nothing way. If I was not feeling very good than I felt as if everything was really bad. And since feeling very good is something most human beings only get to experience a relatively small proportion of the time, my perception of feeling bad became a much more dominant experience than was necessary. In fact, mildly unpleasant feeling typically morphed me quickly into feeling terrible via shame-tinged, all-or-none thinking.
The critic’s black-and-white assessment is: “Either I’m cured or I’m still hopelessly defective.”
So how can we come to bear the knowledge that our awful childhoods have created some permanent damage? It helps me to see my Cptsd as somewhat analogous to diabetes, i.e., a condition that will need management throughout my life. This is a piece of bad news that naturally feels offensively unpalatable, but the good news, as with diabetes, is that as we become more skilled at flashback management, Cptsd can gradually become infrequently bothersome. And even more importantly, we can evolve towards leading increasingly
De-minimization is a crucial aspect of confronting denial. It is the process by which a person deconstructs the defense of “making light” of his childhood trauma.
Disidentification from the critic is the fight of a lifetime. To liberate your identity from the toxic critic, you will have to repetitively confront it for a long time. You will have greater success if you are prepared to forgive yourself for repeatedly collapsing back into the old habit of self-blame. Progress is always a gradual back and forth process.
Minimization about the damage caused by extensive emotional neglect is at the core of the Cptsd denial onion. Our journey of recovering takes a quantum leap when we really feel and understand how devastating it was to be emotionally abandoned.
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.
Evaluate whether these points match yourvearly childhood feelings. Which ones?
Through such neglect the child’s consciousness eventually becomes overwhelmed with the processes of drasticizing and catastrophizing. Drasticizing and catastrophizing are critic processes that lead the child to constantly rehearse fearful scenarios in a vain attempt to prepare himself for the worst. This is the process by which Cptsd with its overdeveloped stress and toxic shame programs sets in and becomes triggerable by a plethora of normally innocuous stimuli.
Even love, coming their way, reverberates threateningly on a subliminal level. Unconsciously, they fear that if they momentarily “trick” someone into liking them, the forbidden prize will vanish once their social perfectionism inevitably fails and exposes their unworthiness. Moreover, when this occurs, they will be triggered even more deeply into the abandonment mélange.
I was still convinced that everyone but my therapist would find me abhorrent if I shared about my flashback feelings.
Variances in your childhood abuse/neglect pattern, birth order and genetics result in you gravitating toward a specific 4F survival strategy. You do this as a child to prevent, escape or ameliorate further traumatization.
A survivor also avoids vulnerable relating because his past makes him believe that he will be attacked or abandoned as he was in childhood.
Flight-freeze types are prone to becoming porn addicts. When in flight mode, they obsessively surf the net for phantom partners and engage in compulsive masturbation. When in freeze mode, they drift off into a right-brain sexual fantasy world if pornography is unavailable. Moreover, if they are in intimacy-lite relationship, they typically engage more with their idealized fantasy partners than with their actual partner during real time sexual interactions.
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. Unfortunately, this typically happens at such an early age that they later have little or no memory of it.
Codependency is a fear-based inability to express rights, needs and boundaries in relationship.
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.
I relate to fawn in some ways, but don't think this bit fits me. I don't naturally elicit info from others. I download a heap of my stuff that's been trapped inside me
to agree than to dissent,
Yes...i identify
to offer care than to ask for help,
Yes
to leave choices to the other rather than to express preferences.
Yes
“Disapproval Is Okay With Me”
I really struggle with sitting with what I feel is another's disapproval. For example keith lecturing me about keys on car seat or weed being out or climbing on roof or bong being too dirty or carpet needing cleaned or dates being past best before date, etc
These are some common experiences of being in an emotional flashback. You feel little, fragile and helpless. Everything feels too hard. Life is too scary. Being seen feels excruciatingly vulnerable.
