Complex PTSD Quotes

“Reciprocal verbal ventilation is the highway to intimacy in adult relationships. Sufficient practice with a safe enough other brings genuine experiences of comforting and restorative connection. For me and many of my clients, such experiences are more alleviating of loneliness than we had ever thought possible.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“angering, crying, verbal ventilating and feeling.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“4. PHYSICAL NURTURANCE: Affection and protection. Healthy diet and sleep schedule. Teaching habits of grooming, discipline, and responsibility. Helping the child develop hobbies, outside interests, and own sense of personal style. Helping the child balance rest, play, and work.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“3. EMOTIONAL NURTURANCE: Meeting the child consistently with caring, regard and interest. Welcoming and valuing the child’s full emotional expression. Modeling non-abusive expression of emotions. Teaching safe ways to release anger that do not hurt the child or others. Generous amounts of love, warmth, tenderness, and compassion. Honoring tears as a way of releasing hurt. Being a safe refuge. Humor.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“2. SPIRITUAL NURTURANCE: Seeing and reflecting back to the child his or her essential worth, basic goodness and loving nature. Engendering experiences of joy, fun, and love to maintain the child’s innate sense that life is a gift. Spiritual or philosophical guidance to help the child integrate painful aspects of life. Nurturing the child’s creative self-expression. Frequent exposure to nature.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“1. VERBAL NURTURANCE: Eager participation in multidimensional conversation. Generous amounts of praise and positive feedback. Willingness to entertain all questions. Teaching, reading stories, providing resources for ongoing verbal development”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Grieving expands Insight and Understanding”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“We grieve the losses of childhood because these losses are like deaths of important parts of ourselves. Effective grieving brings these parts back to life. In this chapter we describe the healing that is available through the four practices of grieving: angering, crying, verbal ventilating and feeling.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Endangerment is the process of constantly projecting danger onto safe enough situations. Your recovering depends on learning how to recognize and confront the 14 inner critic attacks listed below. When this process of recovering is bypassed, these deeply engrained programs continue to send you tumbling back into the overwhelming fear, shame and hopelessness of your childhood abandonment.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Growing up emotionally neglected is like nearly dying of thirst outside the fenced off fountain of a parent’s warmth and interest. Emotional neglect makes children feel worthless, unlovable and excruciatingly empty. It leaves them with a hunger that gnaws deeply at the center of their being. They starve for human warmth and comfort.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Traumatic emotional neglect occurs when a child does not have a single caretaker to whom she can turn in times of need or danger.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“As emotional recovery progresses, the mindfulness described above begins to extend toward our emotional experience. This helps us to stop automatically dissociating from our feelings. We then learn to identify our feelings and choose healthy ways to respond to them and from them.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“When you intricately understand how antagonistic your parents were to your healthy sense of self, you become more motivated to engage in the self-help processes of rectifying their damage. The more you identify their damage the more you know what to fix.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“We need to understand exactly how appalling parenting created the now self-perpetuating trauma that we live in. We can learn to do this in a way that takes the mountain of unfair self-blame off ourselves.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“It is important to understand that variances in the childhood abuse/neglect patterns, birth order, and genetic predispositions result in people polarizing to their particular 4F type.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Furthermore, Cptsd can also be caused by emotional neglect alone. This key theme is explored at length in chapter 5. If you notice that you are berating yourself because your trauma seems insignificant compared to others, please skip ahead to this chapter and resume reading here upon completion. Emotional neglect also typically underlies most traumatizations that are more glaringly evident.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders and prison guards typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves, prisoners, and children, who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself”. - Jane Eyre”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“My parents’ twisted version of this boiled down to: “As f*cked up as we are, we’re still way better than you”.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Horrible world events, difficult choices, illnesses and periodic feelings of abject loneliness are common examples of existential pain.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“This appears to be a mechanism of dissociation, and in this instance, it rendered my client amnesiac of my high regard for our work together. I”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The survivor may, seemingly without reason, visualize someone being abusive.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“jeopardy, but that he is also “a sorry excuse for a human being”. Over time, the look can make the recipient feel terrified and repugnant, as it drives him into an emotional flashback of fear and shame. When”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“When abuse or neglect is severe enough, any one category of it can cause the child to develop Cptsd. This is true even in the case of emotional neglect if both parents collude in it, as we will see in chapter 5. When abuse and neglect is multidimensional, the severity of the Cptsd worsens accordingly.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving