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July 22 - August 11, 2022
“Not just PTSD. Complex PTSD. The difference between regular PTSD and complex PTSD is that traditional PTSD is often associated with a moment of trauma. Sufferers of complex PTSD have undergone continual abuse—trauma that has occurred over a long period of time, over the course of years. Child abuse is a common cause of complex PTSD,” she says.
The books taught me that when we live through traumatic experiences, our brains take in the things around us that are causing the greatest threat, and they encode these things deep into our subconscious as sources of danger.
Therapists instead prefer to take on YAVIS—Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful clients.
The literature says this is normal for traumatized people. Experts say it’s all part of the three P’s: We think our sadness is personal, pervasive, and permanent. Personal, in that we have caused all the problems we face. Pervasive, in that our entire life is defined by our failings. And permanent, in that the sadness will last forever.
There is overwhelming evidence that meditation can increase focus and decrease anxiety, depression, and cortisol flooding.1 There is evidence that it decreases activation in the amygdala, one epicenter of fear in the brain, and increases activity in the prefrontal cortex.2
The sympathetic nervous system, or the fight-or-flight system, is activated by stress. This is the system that gets us ready to run. The counter to this is the parasympathetic nervous system, the resting-and-digesting system. It lowers heart rate and blood pressure, slows breathing, and directly counters the stress response.
I try a grounding technique I’d recently read about: counting colors. I whirled around the room and counted all the red things: a book cover, a board game, a flowerpot, a dress in a painting, a flower on a cushion.
Gratitude lifted my baseline mood up from being constantly seared by the pain of existence to living a largely satisfying life.
Judith Herman, the woman who coined the term complex PTSD, wrote: “The abused child . . . must find a way to preserve hope and meaning.
To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them.
think it’s why I work so hard all the time. I’ll take on other people’s work, I’ll do more than I should, because I have this need for acceptance. I need my boss to tell me that I did a good job or I’ll have this anxiety—this incompleteness, that no matter how hard I try, I can’t hit.”
Despite the fact that these mice had never smelled cherry blossoms before and had never been shocked, they still shuddered and jumped when it wafted into their cages. This generation of mice had inherited their parents’ trauma.
The present was this little tribe of reliable people who considered me a part of them. It was this feeling of belonging. You’re ours.
in his neuroimaging studies that during the mid-luteal phase (the second half of the menstrual cycle after ovulation), we have higher levels of emotional arousal and more connectivity between emotion and memory.
The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people. Not just reading self-help books or meditating alone. We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place.
Forgiveness is this act of love where you say to someone, ‘You’re an imperfect being and I still love you.’
Only, as in a quote often attributed to Anaïs Nin, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
He said I should approach difficult conversations with an attitude of “What is hurting you?” instead of “Have I hurt you?”
sat with that a moment. I remembered how people with C-PTSD can often assume problems are about them—not out of selfishness or narcissism but because they want to have enough control to be able to solve the problem.
I mentalized and metacommunicated—fancy terms Dr. Ham taught me that basically mean say what you’re thinking out loud. “I’m feeling worried that you’re shifting the attention to me because you don’t want to burden me with your problems. But I just want to say that your problems aren’t a burden—I’m so curious about what’s going on. My life is so boring right now, and I want to spend time learning about you!”
“What do you need?”
Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.”
“Pain is about feeling real, appropriate, and valid hurt when something bad happens. Suffering is when you add extra dollops to that pain. You’re feeling bad about feeling bad.”
“So many of what we call psychopathologies are actually skills and capabilities gone awry.”
But in times of real danger—when someone furious is coming toward us with an actual machete in their hand, ready to kill—we face the problem head-on, while everyone else is cowering. A lot of the time, we’re the ones getting shit done.
The wars are shorter now, and often, the old tools work well. Counting colors and curiosity and conversations with my child-self muzzle the beast and shove it back into its hovel.
But there are two main differences now: I have hope, and I have agency. I know my feelings, no matter how disconsolate they are, are temporary. I know that regardless of how unruly it is, I am the beast’s master, and at the end of each battle I stand strong and plant my flag: I am alive, I am proud, I am joyful, still.
