More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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. When lost in suicidal ideation, the survivor may even pray to be delivered from this life, or fantasize about being taken by some calamitous act of fate. He may even think or obsess - without being serious - of stepping in front of a car or jumping off a building.
Passive suicidality is typically a flashback to early childhood when our abandonment was so profound, that it was natural for us to wish that God or somebody or something would just put an end to it all.
Emotional neglect also typically underlies most traumatizations that are more glaringly evident. Parents who routinely ignore or turn their backs on a child’s calls for attention, connection or help, abandon their child to unmanageable amounts of fear, and the child eventually gives up and succumbs to depressed, death-like feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.
If however, a person is also afflicted by ongoing family abuse or profound emotional abandonment, the trauma will manifest as a particularly severe emotional flashback because he already has Cptsd. This is particularly true when his parent is also a bully.
Traumatized children often over-gravitate to one of these response patterns to survive, and as time passes these four modes become elaborated into entrenched defensive structures that are similar to narcissistic [fight], obsessive/compulsive [flight], dissociative [freeze] or codependent [fawn] defenses.
Moreover, even when he manages to identify a goal of his own choosing, he may struggle to follow through with extended and concentrated effort. Remedying this developmental arrest is essential because many new psychological studies now show that persistence – even more than intelligence or innate talent - is the key psychological characteristic necessary for finding fulfillment in life.
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. At the same time, it continuously fills her psyche with stories and images of catastrophe.
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.
You are free now as an adult to develop peace of mind and a supportive relationship with yourself. A self-championing stance can transform your existence from struggling survival to a fulfilling sense of thriving.
Mindfulness is a perspective that weds your capacity for self-observation with your instinct of self-compassion. It is therefore your ability to observe yourself from an objective and self-accepting viewpoint. It is a key function of a healthily developed ego and is sometimes described as the observing ego or the witnessing self.
One caveat for recovering the ability to authentically be yourself is that it is unreasonable and unfair to expect anyone to accept you if you are being abusively angry or contemptuous.
Cptsd is a syndrome of the dearth of unconditional love, or what the great therapist, Carl Rogers, called “unconditional positive regard”. Cptsd can also occur when unconditional love is shut off in an all-or-nothing way in early childhood. Some parents can shower love on babies. But as soon as the child begins toddling around and expressing a will of her own, they become severely punishing and rejecting.
According to relatives, we (my siblings and I) were neglected and abused from birth.
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.
Need to learn - others cannot fulfill all needs.
We survivors often struggle with managing our understandable but unrealistic yearnings to receive permanent unconditional love from a friend or partner. Like the toddler, we eventually have to accept the limits of adult love.
Need to learn to accept others cannot fulfil those needs.
Self-mothering is a resolute refusal to indulge in self-hatred and self-abandonment. It proceeds from the realization that self-punishment is counterproductive. It is enhanced by the understanding that patience and self-encouragement are more effective than self-judgment and self-rejection in achieving recovery.
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.
