Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

by Pete Walker

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.

These structures help children survive their horrific childhoods, but leave them very limited and narrow in how they respond to life. Even worse, they remain locked in these patterns in adulthood when they no longer need to rely so heavily on one primary response pattern.

Self-acceptance Clear sense of identity Self-Compassion Self-Protection Capacity to draw comfort from relationship Ability to relax Capacity for full self-expression Willpower & Motivation Peace of mind Self-care Belief that life is a gift Self-esteem Self-confidence

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.

Here are some of the most common examples of body-harming reactions to Cptsd stress: Hypervigilance Shallow and Incomplete Breathing Constant Adrenalization Armoring, i.e., Chronic muscle tightness Wear and tear from rushing and armoring Inability to be fully present, relaxed and grounded in our bodies Sleep problems from being over-activated Digestive disorders from a tightened digestive tract Physiological damage from excessive self-medication with alcohol, food or drugs

We advance our recovery process immeasurably when we commit to re-mothering and re-fathering ourselves.

Self-mothering is the practice of loving and accepting the inner child in all phases of his mental, emotional, and physical experience. [If “inner child” is a problematic concept for any reason, you can imagine nurturing the developmentally arrested part of yourself.]

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.

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 your own values. You can pick your own friends, and you don’t have to like everyone. You can sometimes feel confused and ambivalent, and not know all the answers. I am very proud of you.

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, as described in Tool Box 2 of chapter 16. Many survivors benefit greatly from classes and books on assertiveness training.

Recovering is therefore enhanced on every level by safe human help.

deep level recovering, as well as healthy “human-being” is typically a vacillating blend of self-help and help from others.

The more time you practice the various techniques of self-care described throughout this book, the less time you spend in self-abandonment. With enough persistence, self-care becomes an invaluable, irreplaceable habit.

In advanced recovery, self-help and relational-help blend in an all important Tao. A Tao is a yin/yang combination of opposite and complementary forces. The Tao of relational recovery involves balancing healthy independence with healthy dependence on others.

The more self-supportive we become the more we attract supportive others. The more we are supported by others, the more we can support ourselves.

POSITIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOUR F’S

Those who are repetitively traumatized in childhood often learn to survive by over-using one or two of the 4F Reponses. Fixation in any one 4F response not only limits our ability to access all the others, but also severely impairs our ability to relax into an undefended state. Additionally, it strands us in a narrow, impoverished experience of life.

Over time a habitual 4F defense also “serves” to distract us from the nagging voice of the critic and the painful feelings that underlie it. Preoccupation with 4F behaviors dulls our awareness of our unresolved past trauma and the pain of our current alienation.

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.

All this loss of self begins before the child has many words, and certainly no insight. For the budding codependent, all hints of danger soon immediately trigger servile behaviors and abdication of rights and needs.

These response patterns are so deeply set in the psyche, that as adults, many codependents automatically respond to threat like dogs, symbolically rolling over on their backs, wagging their tails, hoping for a little mercy and an occasional scrap. Webster’s second entry for fawn is: “to show friendliness by licking hands, wagging its tail, etc.: said of a dog.” I find it tragic that some codependents are as loyal as dogs to even the worst “masters”.

Finally, I have noticed that extreme emotional abandonment, as described in chapter 5, also creates this kind of codependency. The severely neglected child experiences extreme lack of connection as traumatic, and sometimes responds to this fearful condition by overdeveloping the fawn response. Once a child realizes that being useful and not requiring anything for herself gets her some positive attention...

In worse case scenarios, outer critic drasticizing deteriorates into paranoia. At its worst paranoia deteriorates into fantasies and delusions of persecution.

While scaring us out of trusting others, the outer critic also pushes us to over-control them to make them safer.

To avoid the vulnerability of being close, the outer critic can also broadcast from the various inner critic endangerment program.

Many Cptsd survivors flounder in caustic judgmentalness, shuffling back and forth between pathologizing others [the toxic blame of the outer critic] and pathologizing themselves [the toxic shame of the inner critic].

A verbal diagram of a typical critic-looping scenario looks like this. The outer critic’s judgmentalness is activated by the need to escape the “in-danger” feeling that is triggered by socializing. Even the thought of relating can set off our disapproval programs so that we feel justified in isolating. Extended withdrawal however, reawakens our relational hunger and our impulses to connect. This simultaneously reverses the critic from outer to inner mode. The critic then laundry lists our inadequacies, convincing us that we are too odious to others to socialize. This then generates self-pitying persecution fantasies, which eventually re-invites the outer critic to build a case about how awful people are…ad infinitum…ad nauseam. This looping then keeps us “safe” in the hiding of silent disengagement.

When it emanates from the inner critic direction, the vacillating critic can look like this. The survivor’s negative self-noticing drives her to strive to be perfect. She works so hard and incessantly at it that she begins to resent others who do not. Once the resentment accumulates enough, a minor faux pas in another triggers her to shift into extreme outer critic disappointment and frustration. She then silently perseverates and laundry lists “people” for all their faults and betrayals. How long she remains polarized to the outer critic usually depends on her 4F type, but sooner or later she starts to feel guilty about this, and suddenly the inner critic is back on line judging her harshly for being so judgmental. The cataloguing of her own defects then resumes in earnest.

Our recovering depends on us using mindfulness to decrease our habits of dissociation. Only then can we see the critic programs that we need to deconstruct, shrink and consciously disidentify from. This typically involves learning to tolerate the pain that comes from discovering how pervasive and strong the critic is. This pain is sometimes a hard pill to swallow because progress in fighting the critic is hard to see at first. And then, even when our shrinking work is effective, progress usually feels disappointingly slow and gradual. This is especially true during a flashback, when the critic can seem to be as strong as ever.

Since thoughts typically give rise to speech, I also recommend that you practice the “5 positives to 1 negative” guideline when giving feedback to a loved one.

The role of grieving in shrinking the outer critic is as crucial as it is with the inner critic.

As with the inner critic, angering at the outer critic helps to silence it, and crying helps to evaporate it.

We can use the anger of our grief to energize our thought corrections. This helps us to challenge the critic’s entrenched all-or-none perspective that everyone is as dangerous as our parents. Moreover, when our grieving opens into crying, it can release the fear that the outer critic uses to frighten us out of opening to others. Tears can also help us realize that our loneliness is now causing us mu...

Just as the inner critic transmutes unreleased anger into self-hate, the outer critic uses it to control and /or push others away.

Unexpressed and unworked through anger about childhood hurt is a hidden reserve that the critic can always tap into. The anger work of grieving the losses of childhood is so essential because it breaks the critic’s supply line to this anger.

there are two healthy applications of outer critic aggressiveness. One is to protect ourselves when someone is actually attacking us. The other is in the work of grieving the losses of childhood.

Critic management is often the primary work of early stage grief work. This work involves recognizing and challenging the ways the critic is blocking or shaming the processes of grieving. As disidentification from the critic increases, grieving can then best be initiated with low intensity verbal ventilation. Over time verbal ventilation can be allowed to gradually increase in sad and angry intonation.

Once the critic has been sufficiently diminished and once thought-correction techniques have made the psyche more user-friendly, a person begins to tap into grief’s sweet relief-granting potential. He learns to grieve in a way that promotes and enhances compassion for the abandoned child he was and for the survivor he is today – still struggling in the throes of painful flashbacks.

Fear drives the toxic inner critic.

Grieving is at its most effective when the survivor can grieve in four ways: angering, crying, verbal ventilating and feeling.

Survivors need to resuscitate their instinctual anger about parental maltreatment or they risk blindly accepting others’ reenactments of these behaviors.

Crying is also an irreplaceable tool for cutting off the critic’s emotional fuel supply.

crying is sometimes the only process that will resolve a flashback.

When we greet our own tears with self-acceptance, crying awakens our develop- mentally arrested instinct of self-compassion.

Verbal ventilation is the third process of grieving. It is the penultimate resolver of emotional flashbacks. Verbal ventilation is speaking or writing in a manner that airs out and releases painful feelings.

When we let our words spring from what we feel, language is imbued with emotion, and pain can be released through what we say, think or write. As our grieving proficiency increases, we can verbally ventilate about our losses,

Verbal ventilation, at its most potent, is the therapeutic process of bringing left-brain cognition to intense right-brain emotional activation.

Techniques To Invite And Enhance Grieving

Find a safe and comfortable place where you won’t be heard. Close your eyes and remember a time when you felt compassionate towards someone. This can be from real life, or from reading a book or a poem, or from watching a movie or moving news item. Invoke self-compassion via the memory of someone who was kind to you, or imagine someone you think would be kind to you. I would be kind to you. Verbally ventilate about what is bothering you in a journal or aloud to a real or imagined friend or to me. Imagine yourself being comforted by a Higher Power. See yourself in the lap of a kind higher power or actual person who seems kind. [Santa Claus once worked well for one of my clients]. Remember a time when you felt better from crying or angering, or seeing someone else cry in real life or in a movie. Remember a time when being angry, or when someone else being angry, saved you from harm. Imagine your anger forming a protective fiery shield around you. Imagine your tears or anger carrying any fear, shame or depression up and out of you. Imagine holding your inner child compassionately. Tell the child it’s normal and okay to feel sad or mad about feeling bad or hurt. Tell the child you’ll protect him/her from being criticized. Breathe deeply, fully and slowly. Put on some moving or evocative music. Watch a movie that is poignant. Watch a movie that portrays “enviable” anger release.

The cyclothymic two-step is the dance of flight types or subtypes who habitually overreact to their tiredness with workaholic or busyholic activity. Self-medicating with their own adrenalin, they “run” to counteract the emotional tiredness of the unprocessed abandonment depression.