Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

This is a list of 13 practical steps for helping yourself to manage an emotional flashback:

As we move out of early recovery, we begin to observe that internal triggers are even more common than external ones. Such triggers are commonly the nasty spawn of the inner critic. Typically they are thoughts and visualizations about endangerment or the need for perfection. The survivor may, seemingly without reason, visualize someone being abusive. Moreover he can also, seemingly out of the blue, worry himself into a flashback by simply thinking he is not perfectly executing a task that he is undertaking. He can also frighten himself by enumerating the many ways that he might mess up any upcoming task. When internal triggering is at its worst, small potato miscues and peccadilloes trigger us into a full blown emotional flashback. We then devolve into a polarized process of negative-noticing – an incessant preoccupation with defects and hazards. We perseverate about everything that has gone or could go wrong. As recovery progresses, many survivors are shocked to discover that the majority of their flashbacks are triggered internally by these types of inner critic programs. We will explore below and in the next two chapters the ways we can rescue ourselves from the critic’s internal triggering processes.

One common sign of being flashed-back is that we feel small, helpless, and hopeless.

Another common clue that we are flashing back is an increase in the virulence of the inner or outer critic. This typically looks like increased drasticizing and catastrophizing, as well as intensified self-criticism or judgmentalness of others.

Another clue that we are in a flashback occurs when we notice that our emotional reactions are out of proportion to what has triggered them.

Another clue about being in a flashback is an increased use of primitive self-soothing techniques. Many survivors learn early in life to manage their painful feelings with food, distracting activities or mood-altering substances.

Think I may be stress eater. Can I think of childhood examples?

With practice, mindfully noticing a sudden upsurge in craving can be interpreted as the need to invoke the flashback management steps.

Many children appear to be hard-wired to adapt to this endangering abandonment with perfectionism.

the superego is the part of the psyche that learns parental rules in order to gain their acceptance.

The inner critic blames you incessantly for shortcomings that it imagines to be the cause of your parents’ rejection.

As a traumatized child, your over-aroused sympathetic nervous system also drives you to become increasingly hypervigilant. Hypervigilance is a fixation on looking for danger that comes from excessive exposure to real danger. In an effort to recognize, predict and avoid danger, hypervigilance is ingrained in your approach to being in the world. Hypervigilance narrows your attention into an incessant, on-guard scanning of the people around you. It also frequently projects you into the future, imagining danger in upcoming social events. Moreover, hypervigilance typically devolves into intense performance anxiety on every level of self-expression.

The critic-driven child can only think about the ways she is too much or not enough.

In my work with survivors, I am continuously struck by how often the inner critic triggers them into overwhelming emotional flashbacks. The Cptsd-derived inner critic weds our fear of abandonment to our self-hate about our imperfections. It then tortures us with the entwined serpents of perfectionism and endangerment. Endangerment is the process of constantly projecting danger onto safe enough situations.

In main stream psychology, shame is often described as a social emotion. Normal shame is a somewhat healthy, self-regulating emotional reaction that arises when someone witnesses us acting in an unfair, offensive, or hurtful way. This is not the case with toxic shame however. Many Cptsd survivors in recovery soon realize that they do not need a witness to suddenly be catapulted into a shame attack.

Moreover, toxic shame is social in the moment of the solitary flashback, because at the time it is as if we are in the presence of our parents.

I'm not sure my toxic shame feelings remind me of being in presence of mother. Perhaps is more tied to stories told myself/misinterpretations of absence of father?

I believe this phenomenon corresponds with an internalization of our parents. Our parents were such formative and formidable presences in our developing life, that we have strong representations of them in our psyches. These representations include their beliefs and condemnation about us.

Not sure I internalize my mom. I don't hear her voice for example

I believe this phenomenon corresponds with an internalization of our parents. Our parents were such formative and formidable presences in our developing life, that we have strong representations of them in our psyches. These representations include their beliefs and condemnation about us.

What did I think mom's beliefs/condemnations were about me as child?

With little mindfulness of it, we injure ourselves with countless angry, self-disgusted repetitions of their judgments.

perfectionism also seems to be an instinctual defense for emotionally abandoned children.

As the quest for perfection fails over and over, and as parental acceptance and nurturing remain elusive, imperfection becomes synonymous with shame and fear. Perceived imperfection triggers fear of abandonment, which triggers self-hate for imperfection, which expands abandonment into self-abandonment. This in turn amps fear up even further, which in turn intensifies self-disgust, etc. On and on it goes in a downward spiral of fear and shame-encrusted depression. It can go on for hours, days, weeks, and for those with severe Cptsd, can become their standard mode of being.

Successful critic-shrinking usually requires thousands of angry skirmishes with the critic. Passionate motivation for this work often arises when we construct an accurate picture of our upbringing. 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.

I'm not afraid of you mom. I don't need you to want me back, dad. ?

Shame Is Blame Unfairly Turned Against The Self

Our parents were too big and powerful to blame, so we had to blame ourselves instead.

Progress in critic-shrinking is often infinitesimally slow and indiscernible at first. Our brains have become addicted to only noticing what is wrong and what is dangerous.

The outer critic is the part that views everyone else as flawed and unworthy.

Via its all-or-none programming, the outer critic rejects others because they are never perfect and cannot be guaranteed to be safe.

The outer critic developed in reaction to parents who were too dangerous to trust. The outer critic helped us to be hyperaware of the subtlest signal that our parents were deteriorating into their most dangerous behaviors. Over time the outer critic grew to believe that anyone and everyone would inevitably turn out to be as untrustworthy as our parents. Now, in situations where we no longer need it, the outer critic alienates us from others. It attacks others and scares them away, or it builds fortresses of isolation whose walls are laundry lists of their exaggerated shortcomings. In an awful irony, the critic attempts to protect us from abandonment by scaring us further into it.

Finally it is not unusual for survivors, who have significantly shrunk their dominant critic mode, to experience a reciprocal increase in the virulence of its opposite counterpart. This came as a disappointing shock to me at a time when I was congratulating myself that my inner critic was a mere shadow of its former self. Soon thereafter, I noticed that I was plagued by a new judgmentalness that seemed out of character. Curiosity and a growing mindfulness about this development lead me to a lot of the insights that I share in this chapter. With enough mindfulness, this shift in critic mode can then become an opportunity to further shrink the overall combined agency of the outer and inner critic.

I subscribe to authenticity as one of my highest values, but it does not include sharing my outer critic’s view of you or exposing my inner critic’s unfair judgments of me.

We must renounce unconscious outer critic strategies such as: [1] “I will use angry criticism to make you afraid of me, so I can be safe from you”; [2] “Why should I bother with people when everyone is so selfish and corrupt” [all-or-none thinking]; [3] “I will perfectionistically micromanage you to prevent you from betraying or abandoning me”; [4] “I will rant and rave or leave at the first sign of a lonely feeling, because ‘if you really loved me, I would never feel lonely’”.

The greatest hindrance to effective grieving is typically the inner critic. When the critic is especially toxic, grieving may be counterproductive and contraindicated in early recovery. Those who were repeatedly pathologized and punished for emoting in childhood may experience grieving as exacerbating their flashbacks rather than relieving them.

Moreover self-compassion creates a foundation from which we can build authentic, intimacy-enhancing compassion for others. The depth of our ability to be there for an intimate generally depends on the depth of our capacity to practice unwavering allegiance to ourselves.

Susan Vaughan’s MRI research demonstrates that emotional flashbacks over-activate the emotionally oriented right-brain and under-activate the thinking-oriented left-brain.

Right-brain dissociation

This is me

Left-Brain Dissociation

This is Keith

In recovery then, feeling is surrendering to our internal experiences of pain without judging or resisting them, and

Kinda need to work on foing this with others' pain/feelings too...like keith's

Feeling is a kinesthetic rather than a cognitive experience. It is the process of shifting the focus of your awareness off of thinking and onto your affects, energetic states and sensations. It is the proverbial “getting out of your head” and “getting into your body.”

or she flips on the TV and foggily tunes out or dozes off again [Freeze]

The first thing that we usually begin to notice in early recovery is that suddenly we are engaged in our most typical 4F response. As recovery progresses we become aware of the critic. Eventually this promotes mindfulness of the fear and shame that fuel the critic. And finally in later recovery, we become aware of the abandonment depression itself.

One of the biggest challenges of mindfully focusing on depression is to not dissociate into sleep.

Mindful merging with the subtle emotions and sensations of depression is the finishing tool of deconstructing self-abandonment. Over and over I focused on the sensations of my depression. Occasionally these sensations were intense, but more often they were very subtle.

When the critic is especially loud and persistent, shifting your awareness from thinking to feeling your sensations is a potent way of coming home to a safer place.

Pseudo-Cyclothymia

Keith atm?

“Although we often work on many levels of recovering at the same time, recovering is to some degree progressive. It begins on the cognitive level when psychoeducation and mindfulness helps us understand that we have Cptsd. This awakening then allows us to learn how to approach the journey of deconstructing the various life-spoiling dynamics of Cptsd.

Approach To A Flashback

With ongoing recovery work, I realized that anything to do with food could easily flash me back to the family dinner table - the battlefield of my dysfunctional family.

Why keith hates cooking/utilitarian?

“Screw you Helen [mom] and Charlie [dad] for frightening me so much about making mistakes that I freak out when things don’t go perfectly!

When forgiveness has substance, it is felt palpably in the heart, and is usually an expansion of the emotion of compassion. Compassion is certainly not always the same thing as forgiveness, but it is usually the experience within which forgiveness is born. Often this happens via an intermediate process, where having grieved our childhood losses substantially, we occasionally find ourselves considering the extenuating circumstances that contributed to our parents raising us in neglectful or abusive ways. Most commonly these extenuating circumstances revolve around two issues. First, our parents often parented us in ways that blindly replicated the ways that they were parented. And second, they were often supported in their dysfunctional parenting by the social norms and values of their times.

Nonetheless, it is once again vitally important that we do not jump into considering their mitigating circumstances until we have significantly worked through the traumatic consequences that their abuse and abandonment had on us.