Complex PTSD Quotes

“I cannot overstate the importance of becoming aware of your inner self-commentary. With enough practice, mindfulness eventually awakens your fighting spirit to resist the abusive refrains from your childhood, and to replace them with thoughts that are self-supportive. Mindfulness also helps you to establish a perspective from which you can assess and guide your own efforts of recovering.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“some of the latest research in neuroscience suggests that we actually need a modicum of stress in our life. This type of stress is called optimal stress. Optimal stress is the balanced, moderate amount of stress that appears to be necessary to grow the new neurons and neuronal connections that correlate with keeping the brain healthy. Research shows that just as too much stress creates a biochemical condition that damages neurons in the brain, too little stress leads to the atrophy, death and lack of replacement of old neurons. This is why lifelong learning is widely recognized as one of the key practices necessary to avoid Alzheimer’s disease.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“A survivor can learn to grieve himself out of fear - the death of feeling safe. He can learn to grieve himself out of shame - the death of feeling worthy. He can learn to grieve himself out of depression - the death of feeling fully alive.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Many traumatologists see attachment disorder as one of the key symptoms of Complex PTSD. In the psychoeducational phases of working with traumatized clients, I typically describe attachment disorder as the result of growing up with primary caretakers who were regularly experienced as dangerous. They were dangerous by contemptuous voice or heavy hand, or more insidiously, dangerous by remoteness and indifference.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Perhaps all addictive behavior is our misguided attempts to self-medicate deeper abandonment pain and unmet attachment needs.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Occasional feelings of listlessness and anhedonia [inability to enjoy our usual pleasures] are normal and existential. A modicum of ennui and dissatisfaction are part of the price of admission to life. Moreover, depression is sometimes an invaluable herald of the need to slow down for rest and restoration. When depression is most helpful, it gives us access to a unique spring of intuition, such as that which informs us that a once valued job or relationship is no longer healthy for us. In such instances we feel depressed because some irreparable change has rendered some central thing in our lives detrimental to us. This functional depression is signaling us to let it die and move on.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Verbal ventilation, at its most potent, is the therapeutic process of bringing left-brain cognition to intense right-brain emotional activation. It fosters the recoveree’s ability to put words to feelings, and ultimately to accurately interpret and communicate about his various feeling states. When this process is repeated sufficiently, new neural pathways grow that allow the left- and right-brain to work together so that the person can actually think and feel at the same time.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Many of us suffer from a socialization process that relegates angering to men and crying to women. From an early age boys are shamed for crying while girls are treated similarly for angering. Hence boys become men who can only vent their emotional pain through angering. Sadness then must morph into an irritable mood, aggravated whining or angry catharsis. Similarly, some women unconsciously try to squeeze their anger out by whining or crying in a way that devolves into feeling stuck in helplessness and self-pity.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out: “It tastes sweet doesn’t it?” “You have caught me”, grief answered, “And you’ve ruined my business How can I sell sorrow, when you know its blessing?” -RUMI”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The most common transferrential dynamic that I witness occurs when leftover hurt about a parent gets displaced onto someone we perceive as hurting us in the present. When this occurs, we respond to them with a magnified anger or anguish that is out of proportion to what they did.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The survivor who is polarized to the outer critic often develops a specious belief that his subjectively derived standards of correctness are objective truth. When triggered, he can use the critic’s combined detective-lawyer-judge function to prosecute the other for betrayal with little or no evidence. Imagined slights, insignificant peccadilloes, misread facial expressions, and inaccurate “psychic” perceptions can be used to put relationships on trial. In the proceedings, the outer critic typically refuses to admit positive evidence. Extenuating circumstances will not be considered in this kangaroo court. Moreover any relational disappointment can render a guilty verdict that sentences the relationship to capital punishment. This is also the process by which jealousy can become toxic and run riot.”
― 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. 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.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I am repeatedly heartened to read the accumulating evidence from neuroscience research that proves the neuroplasticity of the brain. 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

“Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. Striving to be perfect offers her a semblance of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence. As the quest for perfection fails over and over, and as parental acceptance and nurturing remain elusive, imperfection becomes synonymous with shame and fear. Perceived imperfection triggers fear of abandonment, which triggers self-hate for imperfection, which expands abandonment into self-abandonment. This in turn amps fear up even further, which in turn intensifies self-disgust, etc. On and on it goes in a downward spiral of fear and shame-encrusted depression. It can go on for hours, days, weeks, and for those with severe Cptsd, can become their standard mode of being.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The task of diminishing these self-negating patterns is daunting. It is typically lifetime work – often negotiable only at the rate of two-steps-forward, one-step backward. And oh how unfair it is that the step backward often feels more like six!”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“As a traumatized child, your over-aroused sympathetic nervous system also drives you to become increasingly hypervigilant. Hypervigilance is a fixation on looking for danger that comes from excessive exposure to real danger. In an effort to recognize, predict and avoid danger, hypervigilance is ingrained in your approach to being in the world. Hypervigilance narrows your attention into an incessant, on-guard scanning of the people around you.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Another common clue that we are flashing back is an increase in the virulence of the inner or outer critic. This typically looks like increased drasticizing and catastrophizing, as well as intensified self-criticism or judgmentalness of others. A very common example of this is lapsing into extremely polarized, all-or-none thinking such as only being able to see what is wrong with yourself and/or others.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“For the budding codependent, all hints of danger soon immediately trigger servile behaviors and abdication of rights and needs.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Many toddlers, at some point, transmute the flight urge into the running around in circles of hyperactivity. This adaptation “works” on some level to help them escape from the uncontainable feelings of the abandonment mélange. Many of these unfortunates later symbolically run away from their pain. They deteriorate into the obsessive-compulsive adaptations of workaholism, busyholism, spend-aholism, and sex and love addiction that are common in flight types.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Extreme flight types are like machines with the switch stuck in the “on” position. They are obsessively and compulsively driven by the unconscious belief that perfection will make them safe and love-able. They rush to achieve. They rush as much in thought [obsession] as they do in action [compulsion]. As children, flight types variably respond to their family trauma on a hyperactive continuum. The flight defense continuum stretches between the extremes of the driven “A” student and the ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder] dropout running amok. 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

“Fight types need to see how their condescending, moral high-ground position alienates others and perpetuates their present time abandonment. They must renounce the illusion of their own perfection and the habit of projecting perfectionistic inner critic processes onto others.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“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

“If the charming bully is charismatic enough, those close to him will often fail to register the unconscionable meanness of his scapegoating. The bully’s favorites often slip into denial, relieved that they are not the target. Especially charismatic bullies may even be admired and seen as great. Being the scapegoated child or spouse of such a bully is especially problematic because it is so difficult to get anyone to validate that you were or are being abused by them.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“emotionally abandoned children often devolve into experiencing all people as dangerous, no matter how benign or generous they may in fact be. Even love, coming their way, reverberates threateningly on a subliminal level. Unconsciously, they fear that if they momentarily “trick” someone into liking them, the forbidden prize will vanish once their social perfectionism inevitably fails and exposes their unworthiness. Moreover, when this occurs, they will be triggered even more deeply into the abandonment mélange.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The emotional hunger that comes from parental abandonment often morphs over time into an insatiable appetite for substances and/or addictive processes. Minimization of early abandonment often transforms later in life into the minimizing that some survivors use to rationalize their substance and process addictions.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Children so need to believe that their parents love and care for them, that they will deny and minimize away evidence of the most egregious neglect and abuse.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I feel shame because my parents rained disgust on me for being me. I say no to these toxic parental curses, and I am proud and right to see how they tried to murder my soul. I give them their shame back as disgust – the disgust any healthy adult feels when he sees a parent bullying a child with contempt, or when he sees a parent heartlessly ignoring a suffering child.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Her parents modeled and encouraged sarcasm and constant fault finding among the children. Moreover, interactions of cooperation or warmth were routinely ridiculed. 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

“As long as I am not hurting anyone, I refuse to be shamed for normal emotional responses like anger, sadness, fear and depression. I especially refuse to attack myself for how hard it is to completely eliminate the self-hate habit.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Perfection is a self-persecutory myth. I do not have to be perfect to be safe or loved in the present. I am letting go of relationships that require perfection. I have a right to make mistakes. Mistakes do not make me a mistake.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving