Complex PTSD Quotes

“A reluctance to participate in such a fundamental realm of the human experience results in much unnecessary loss. For just as without night there is no day, without work there is no play, without hunger there is no satiation, without fear there is no courage, without tears there is no joy, and without anger, there is no real love.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“repression of one end of the emotional continuum often leads to a repression of the whole continuum, and the person becomes emotionally deadened.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“An especially tragic developmental arrest that afflicts many survivors is the loss of their will power and self-motivation. Many dysfunctional parents react destructively to their child’s budding sense of initiative. If this occurs throughout his childhood, the survivor may feel lost and purposeless in his life. He may drift through his whole life rudderless and without a motor.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Sibling rivalry is further reinforced in dysfunctional families by the fact that all the children are subsisting on minimal nurturance, and are therefore without resources to give to each other. Moreover, competition for the little their parents have to give creates even fiercer rivalries.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“When contempt replaces the milk of human kindness at an early age, the child feels humiliated and overwhelmed. Too helpless to protest or even understand the unfairness of being abused, the child eventually becomes convinced that she is defective and fatally flawed. Frequently she comes to believe that she deserves her parents’ persecution.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“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.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Moreover, most of the diagnoses mentioned above are typically treated as innate characterological defects rather than as learned maladaptations to stress – adaptations that survivors were forced to learn as traumatized children. And, most importantly, because these adaptations were learned, they can often be extinguished”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Over time this practice will build his ability to stay passively present to the sensations of his deeper feelings – to his fear, shame and depression. But in early stages, this awareness will often morph into the need to actively emote them out – to grieve himself out of the abandonment mélange. Eventually, however, his abandonment mélange feelings will also be digested and worked through purely with the solvent of awareness. This also applies to anxiety which is often fear just below the level of awareness. With sufficient practice, anxiety can often be felt through passively”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Thus, grieving is especially profound when we can fluidly shift between feeling and emoting. Sometimes we will only need to fully feel and accept the sensations of our pain. Other times we will want to verbally ventilate about our pain with someone who gives us full permission to color our words with angering and tears.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Emoting is when we cry, anger out, or verbally ventilate the energy of an inner emotional experience. Feeling, on the other hand, is the inactive process of staying present to internal emotional experience without reacting. In recovery then, feeling is surrendering to our internal experiences of pain without judging or resisting them, and without emoting them out.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“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. As stated earlier, the critic grew carcinogenically in childhood. It is like a pervasive cancer that requires many uncomfortable operations to remove. Nonetheless, we can choose to face the acute pain of critic-shrinking work because we want to end the chronic pain of having the critic destroy our enjoyment of life. It is the fight of a lifetime.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“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.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“When we become lost in this process, we miss out on our crucial emotional need to experience a sense of belonging. We live in permanent estrangement oscillating between the extremes of too good for others or too unlikeable to be included. This is the excruciating social perfectionism of the Janus-faced critic: others are too flawed to love and we are too defective to be lovable.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“While scaring us out of trusting others, the outer critic also pushes us to over-control them to make them safer. Over-controlling behaviors include shaming, excessive criticism, monologing [conversational control] and overall bossiness.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Giving control of our social interactions to the outer critic prohibits the cultivation of the vulnerable communication that makes intimacy possible. 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’”.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“She could see that the outer critic typically triggered her into a very old feeling and belief that “People are so unreliable – they always let you down –they just can’t be trusted!”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Neuroplasticity means that the brain can grow and change throughout our life. Old self-destructive neural pathways can be diminished and new healthier ones can replace them.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“10. Drasticizing/Catastrophizing/Hypochondriasizing. I feel afraid but I am not in danger. I am not “in trouble” with my parents. I will not blow things out of proportion. I refuse to scare myself with thoughts and pictures of my life deteriorating.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Recovering requires being able to recognize inner-critic catastrophizing so that we can resist it with thought-stopping and thought-correction. In this case, I reminded my client of the many times we had caught his critic “freaking out” about every conceivable way his life could go down the tubes. I then encouraged him to refuse to indulge this process, and to angrily say “no” to the critic every time it tried to scare or demean him.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“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.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“in a parellel with false hunger, feeling tired is sometimes unrelated to sleep deprivation, it's instead an emotional experience of the abandonment depression. I believe that emotional tiredness comes from not resting enough in a safe relationship with yourself or another. this emotional exhaustion often masquerades as physiological tiredness. unfortunately, over time the two can become confusingly intertwined.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Here then are some useful messages for nurturing the growth of your self-compassion and self-esteem. I recommend that you imagine speaking them to your inner child, especially when you are suffering with a flashback. Reparenting Affirmations I am so glad you were born. You are a good person.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“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.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“It taught me to practice self-care in a spirit of giving to a child who needed and really deserved to be helped.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“14. Perseverating About Being Attacked. Unless there are clear signs of danger, I will thought-stop my projection of past bullies/critics onto others. The majority of my fellow human beings are peaceful people. I have legal authorities to aid in my protection if threatened by the few who aren’t. I invoke thoughts and images of my friends’ love and support.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“grieving the losses of childhood, and understanding how abusive and negligent parenting is at the root of our problems.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I believe this type of emotional hunger is at the core of most food addictions. One of the reasons food addictions are so difficult to manage is that food was the first source of self-comforting that was available to us. With the dearth of any other comfort, there is little wonder that we came to over-rely on eating for nurturance”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Taboos about depression even emanate from the psychological establishment, where some schools strip it of its status as a legitimate feeling. For them, depression is nothing more than a waste product of negative thinking. Other schools reduce it simplistically to a dysfunctional state that results from the repression of somewhat less taboo emotions like sadness and anger. This is not to say that these factors cannot cause depression. It is to say that depression is a legitimate feeling that often contains the helpful and important information described below.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Retraumatized by her own inner voice, she then launches into her most habitual 4F behavior. She either lashes out domineeringly at the nearest person [Fight] – or she launches busily into anxious productivity [Flight] – or she flips on the TV and foggily tunes out or dozes off again [Freeze] – or she self-abandoningly redirects her attention to figuring out how to fix a friend’s problem [Fawn].”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“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.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving