Complex PTSD Quotes

“the emotional pain of your flashbacks is appropriate but delayed reactions to your childhood abuse and neglect.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Sometimes, as described above, the best understanding you can achieve is an overarching one that your inner child is feeling profoundly abandoned. She is cowering from a humiliating attack from your critic and needs for you to switch gears and demonstrate that you will care for her no matter what.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I learned that when I was feeling especially judgmental of others, it usually meant that I had flashed back to being around my critical parents. The trigger was usually that some vulnerability of mine was in ascendancy. In response, I then over-noticed others’ faults so that I could justify avoiding them and the embarrassment of being seen in a state of not being shiny enough.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“they are thoughts and visualizations about endangerment or the need for perfection. The survivor may, seemingly without reason, visualize someone being abusive. Moreover he can also, seemingly out of the blue, worry himself into a flashback by simply thinking he is not perfectly executing a task that he is undertaking.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“we internalize our parents in a way that they can subliminally appear in our imaginations and give us the look whenever we are less than perfect. This includes “imperfections” in thought, feeling or action.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I did not yet know that I had unconsciously gravitated to this all-or-none nonsense because I was somewhat desperately trying to seduce everyone I met into liking me in the hope that I could finally feel safe.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I can be there caringly for him without abandoning my own feeling of contentment in the moment.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“This anger can then be used to build a healthy fight response. Once again, the fight response is the basis of the instinct of self-protection, of balanced assertiveness, and of the courage that is needed to make relationships equal and reciprocal.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“usually find that deconstructing codependence involves a considerable amount of grieving. Typically this entails many tears about the loss and pain of being so long without healthy self-interest and self-protection. Grieving also unlocks healthy anger about a life lived with such a diminished sense of self.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“code of the fawn type is that it is safer [1] to listen than to talk, [2] to agree than to dissent, [3] to offer care than to ask for help, [4] to elicit the other than to express yourself and [5] to leave choices to the other rather than to express preferences. Sadly, the closest that the unrecovered fawn type comes to getting his needs met is vicariously through helping others.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“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. I wonder how many therapists besides me were prepared for their careers in this way.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I felt furious that something had happened to me to give me a Pavlovian “I’m sorry” response.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“you can get so lost in busyness, that you have difficulty seeing the forest from the trees.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Self-compassionate crying is an unparalleled tool for shrinking the obsessive perseverations of the critic, and for ameliorating the habit of compulsive rushing. As her recovery progresses, the flight type can acquire a “gearbox” that allows her to engage life at a variety of speeds, including neutral. Neutral is especially important for flight types to cultivate.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Left-brain dissociation is using constant thinking to distract yourself from underlying abandonment pain. When thinking is worrying, it is as if underlying fear wafts up and taints the thinking process. Moreover, if compulsivity is hurrying to stay one step ahead of your repressed pain, obsessing is worrying to stay one level above underlying pain.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“When the obsessive/compulsive flight type is not doing, she is worrying and planning about doing.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Flight types relentlessly flee the inner pain of their abandonment with the symbolic flight of constant busyness.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I have helped several fight types by guiding them to cry to release their hurt, rather than always polarizing to angering it out. When we are hurt, part of us is sad and part of us is mad, and no amount of angering can ever metabolize our sadness.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I think as I write this of how many billionaires are venerated, and how most of them stand up very poorly to closer scrutiny. So many billionaires use sociopathic tactics to accrue their fortunes. Examples of this are hostile takeovers, exploitive labor policies, health destroying work conditions, devastating environmental practices and various other forms of cheating, lying and back-stabbing.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Many flight types stay perpetually busy and industrious to avoid being triggered by deeper relating. Others also work obsessively to perfect themselves hoping to someday become worthy enough of love. Such flight types have great difficulty showing anything but their perfect persona.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

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

“You will benefit greatly from seeing emotional flashbacks as direct messages from your child-self about how much your parents rejected you. When denial is significantly deconstructed, you will typically feel genuine compassion for the child that you were. This self-compassion assuages emotional neglect by providing you with the missed childhood experience of receiving empathy in painful emotional states instead of contempt or abandonment.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Bitter-sweet tears are not uncommon in the ongoing work of peeling the layers of the denial onion. The tears are bitter because we realize the abandonment was even more devastating than we previously realized. And then the tears are sweet because they validate the truth of the recollection and put the blame where it truly belongs. And then they may be bitter again because the horrible abandonments happened over and over again when we were so young and legitimately needed so much help. And then they can turn sweet again, as in tears of gratitude, because a person often comes through this kind of depth work with an enhanced compassion for what she suffered and a healthy pride about having survived.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Fear is just an energy in your body. It cannot hurt you if you do not run from it.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The tears are bitter because we realize the abandonment was even more devastating than we previously realized. And then the tears are sweet because they validate the truth of the recollection”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I somehow knew my loneliness would never decrease unless I took the risk to see if certain well chosen others would accept me in all aspects of my experience, not just the shiny ones.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“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.”
― 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. Cptsd then sets in to the degree that there is no alternative adult”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Disidentification from the critic is the fight of a lifetime. To liberate your identity from the toxic critic, you will have to repetitively confront it for a long time. You will have greater success if you are prepared to forgive yourself for repeatedly collapsing back into the old habit of self-blame. Progress is always a gradual back and forth process.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Ongoing assault with critical words systematically destroys our self-esteem and replaces it with a toxic inner critic that incessantly judges us as defective. Even worse, words that are emotionally poisoned with contempt infuse the child with fear and toxic shame. Fear and shame condition him to refrain from asking for attention, from expressing himself in ways that draw attention. Before long, he learns to refrain from seeking any kind of help or connection at all.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving