Complex PTSD Page 10

  As the survivor recovers the right of free choice, she becomes more open to trying new things – healthy things that mainstream society might consider uncool or even taboo. Here are some examples of this that I believe are conducive to both recovery and healthy everyday living: voluntary simplicity, improved diet, meditation, alternative medicine, broad scale compassion, environmentalism, deeper emotional communication and a broader use of the grieving process.

  The survivor who pursues long-term development on his journey of recovering generally achieves greater overall evolution than the average citizen. For many untraumatized people, the pursuit of ongoing learning often stops after their last formal learning experience – whether that is high school or college.

  Introspective development also rewards the recoveree with more perspective and wisdom in making important life choices. It also improves his everyday instinctual choices, such as whether to fight, flee, freeze or fawn in times of real danger.

  Finally, another silver lining, often achieved in later stage recovery, is a greater ability to handle normal pain in the most healthy and least retraumatizing way. By normal pain, I mean the recurring existential pain all human beings experience from time to time via encounters with loss, illness, money troubles, time pressures, etc. Such painful encounters can produce emotional reactions like anger, sadness, fear and depression. The average person has not learned how to verbally ventilate and metabolize their feelings about such events. This results in them getting stuck in painful emotional places, especially depression, for inordinate amounts of time.

  The Emotional Imperialism Of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”

  One reason that recovering survivors attain greater emotional intelligence is that they eventually see through the mainstream media’s indoctrination that people should be happy all the time.

  Much of the general populace, however, becomes increasingly dissociated from their full emotional experience by anxiously pushing to pump up their mood. Many “normal” people strive to fulfill the pursuit of happiness as if it were a patriotic duty. More and more they employ socially acceptable addictions to accomplish this. Snacking, spending, self-medicating, and online puttering are widespread addictions that seem to be ever on the rise.

  A particularly rampant example of unhealthy mood-altering behavior is porn addiction. Addiction to pornography creates a terrible narrowing of consciousness in the many men who are afflicted with it. It commonly destroys their capacity for real intimacy. Tragically, the use of porn is more and more “normalized”, even in many psychological circles.

  Here are two enlightening references on this latter subject: http://www.interchangecounseling.com/blog/why-men-are-so-obsessed-with-sex/ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU.

  As we become more emotionally intelligent, we free ourselves from the hysteria-inducing pressure to continuously pump up the joy in our life.

  Please do not read this as an “Ode against Joy”. It is a blessing to have our natural fair share of laughter and feeling good. But I believe it also a blessing to resist the growing emotional imperialism that demands we become fountains of joy. We are assaulted daily with messages from advertisements, from laugh track-saturated TV shows, and from new age enlightenment gurus who shame us into believing that we are “less than”, if we are not constantly bubbling over with ecstatic Disneyland-like enthusiasm.

  The pressure to be always up was an enormous shame trigger for me for decades. Sadly, I increasingly see clients and friends struggling with self-contempt for not being happy enough.

  Once again, I am certainly not knocking joy, but when it is inauthentic, it is disconcertingly sad and sometimes alienating. In worst case scenarios, a controlling narcissist can emotionally blackmail us to join him in falsely emoting joy. Just as painful is when we codependents force ourselves to laugh to cover up our fear or shame.

  This is also not to say that authentic joy cannot be contagious. Contagious joy is the wonderful experience of being positively triggered into vicariously sharing someone else’s authentic delight. [For an experience of this, go to www.youtube.com and search for “Quadruplets Laughing”].

  In my experience, it seems that authentic joy is much more common in the lives of well parented children. I also do not think that joy is typically as dominant an emotional theme in adult life unless it is synthetically induced with drugs or alcohol. On the other hand, experiences of joy for survivors can gradually become more frequent as a person’s recovery efforts promote increasing feelings of safety in the world.

  As our emotional intelligence increases, I see considerable evidence that our expectations of joy become more reasonable. This allows us to let go of permanent happiness as the unrealistic goal of recovery. Until this happens, we remain at the mercy of the critic’s contemptuous diatribes that we are not being joyful enough. One of my clients recently became mindful enough to see how he was shaming himself for not being as jubilant as those in the beer commercials.

  As a concluding comment to this overview, it is important to emphasize that, like most things in life, there are degrees of Cptsd. The continuum of Cptsd ranges from mild neurosis to psychosis, and from highly functioning to non-functioning. Its severity ranges from having extended periods without flashbacks to being in full flashback horror much of the time. This range also varies from a condition of increased experiences of thriving to a condition of barely surviving disability.

  Progress in recovery is seen, then, in flashbacks becoming more manageable and life satisfaction becoming continuously more frequent. A friend of mine once joked with me: “I’ve got so much recovery, I’m beyond normal – I’m supernormal. I make the normies look like they’re the ones with Cptsd.”

  As we end the overview, we are ready to move to the next chapter, which explains how varying childhood trauma histories can cause Cptsd. Here we will also see how verbal and emotional abuse alone can cause Cptsd, and how profound emotional abandonment is typically at the core of most Cptsd.

  PART II

  THE FINE POINTS OF RECOVERING

  WHAT IF I WAS NEVER HIT?

  Physical and sexual abuse are the most obvious traumas that a child can experience, especially when they are ongoing. However, much that is also traumatic goes unnoticed in Cptsd-engendering families. This often occurs because parental acts of physical abuse are more blatant than acts of verbal and emotional abuse and neglect. It appears to me that just as many children acquire Cptsd from emotionally traumatizing families as from physically traumatizing ones.

  Denial about the traumatic effects of childhood abandonment can seriously hamper your ability to recover. In childhood, ongoing emotional neglect typically creates overwhelming feelings of fear, shame and emptiness. As an adult survivor, you may continuously flashback into this abandonment mélange. Recovering depends on realizing that fear, shame and depression are the lingering effects of a loveless childhood. Without such understanding, your crucial, unmet needs for comforting human connection can strand you in a great deal of unnecessary suffering.

  Denial And Minimization

  Confronting denial is no small task. 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.

  De-minimization is a crucial aspect of confronting denial. It is the process by which a person deconstructs the defense of “making light” of his childhood trauma. The lifelong process of de-minimizing the impact of childhood trauma is like peeling a very slippery and caustic onion. The outer layer for some is the stark physical evidence of abuse, e.g., sexual abuse or excessive corporal punishment. Subsequent layers involve verbal, spiritual and emotional abuse. Core layers have to do with verbal, spiritual and emotional neglect.

  In a perversely ironic way, my parents’ physical abuse of me was a blessing, for it was so blatant that my attempts to suppress, rationalize, make light of and laugh it off lost their power in adolescence, and I was able to see my father for
the bully that he was. [Seeing my idealized mother’s abusiveness came much later].

  Identifying my father’s behavior as abusive eventually helped me become aware of less blatant aspects of my parents’ oppression, and I subsequently discovered the verbal and emotional abuse layer of the onion of my childhood abandonment.

  Verbal And Emotional Abuse.

  The fact that verbal and emotional abuse can be traumatic is lost on many childhood trauma victims, though it is rarely lost on recovering victims of cult brainwashing who also are prone to developing Cptsd.

  Many survivors of verbal and emotional abuse never learn to validate its soul-damaging effects. They never accurately assign current time suffering to it. Attempts to acknowledge it are typically blindsided with thoughts that it was nothing compared to kids who were repeatedly beaten – who “had it so much worse.” As a child, I minimized my father’s frequent face-slapping by comparing it to my friend’s father who used to punch him.

  Much later, however, I finally realized that for me, and many of my clients, verbal and emotional abuse damaged us much more than our physical abuse.

  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.

  Theoretical Neurobiology Of The Critic

  Unrelenting criticism, especially when it is ground in with parental rage and scorn, is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child’s brain.

  Repeated messages of disdain are internalized and adopted by the child, who eventually repeats them over and over to himself. Incessant repetitions result in the construction of thick neural pathways of self-hate and self-disgust. Over time a self-hate response attaches to more and more of the child’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

  Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates internal neural networks of self-loathing. The child is forced to exist in a crippling state of self-attack, which eventually becomes the equivalent of full-fledged self-abandonment. The ability to support himself or take his own side in any way is decimated.

  With ongoing parental reinforcement, these neural pathways expand into a large complex network that becomes an Inner Critic that dominates mental activity. The inner critic’s negative perspective creates many programs of self-rejecting perfectionism. At the same time, it obsesses about danger and catastrophizes incessantly. Chapters 9 and 10 expand on shrinking and deconstructing these life-ruining programs. Until this is accomplished, the survivor typically lives in varying degrees of emotional flashback much of the time.

  The verbal and emotional layer of the abuse onion has many sub-layers of minimization. I have heard clients jokingly repeat numerous versions of this over and over: “I know I’m hard on myself, but if I don’t constantly kick my own ass, I’ll be more of a loser than I already am. In fact, I really need you to come down on me if I try to get away with anything!” A childhood rife with verbal and emotional abuse forces the child to so thoroughly identify with the critic, that it is as if the critic is his whole identity.

  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. Ironically, a pernicious type of self-hate can constellate around the self-judgment that one is especially defective because she cannot simply banish the critic. This is the typical toxic, all-or-none thinking of the critic.

  Sadly, many survivors give up on fighting the critic before recognizing the myriad subtle ways it tortures them. Yet, there is no more noble recovery battle than that which gradually frees the psyche from critic dominance. Until this happens to a significant degree, there is minimal development of the healthy, user-friendly ego.

  Let us look now at how emotional neglect alone can create a psyche-dominating critic.

  Emotional Neglect: The Core Wound In Complex PTSD

  Minimization about the damage caused by extensive emotional neglect is at the core of the Cptsd denial onion. Our journey of recovering takes a quantum leap when we really feel and understand how devastating it was to be emotionally abandoned. An absence of parental loving interest and engagement, especially in the first few years, creates an overwhelming emptiness. Life feels harrowingly frightening to the infant or toddler who is left for long periods without comfort and care. Children are helpless and powerless for a long time, and when they sense that no one has their back, they feel scared, miserable and disheartened. Much of the constant anxiety that adult survivors live in is this still aching fear that comes from having been so frighteningly abandoned.

  Many survivors never discover and work through the wounds that correlate with this level. This happens because they over-assign their suffering to overt abuse and never get to the core issue of their emotional abandonment. As stated above, this is especially likely to occur with survivors who dismissively compare their trauma to those who were abused more noticeably and more dramatically. I find this painfully ironic because some people suffer significant active abuse without developing Cptsd. Typically, they are “spared” because there is one caretaker who does not emotionally neglect them.

  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 [relative, older sibling, neighbor, or teacher] to turn to for comfort and protection. This is especially true when the abandonment occurs 24/7, 365 days a year for the first few years.

  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.

  The Failure To Thrive Syndrome

  When a child is continuously deprived of a nurturing caretaker, love-starvation steadily increases and sometimes devolves into the Failure to Thrive Syndrome.

  Failure to thrive is a term coined in the mid twentieth century to describe the epidemic of baby deaths that occurred when new germ-phobic practices were introduced into hospitals. The new standard was that nurses were prohibited from holding babies for fear of contaminating them. Infant mortality immediately began to climb.

  Modern medical practice has abandoned this heartless approach because of the Failure to thrive research. This research has since been corroborated by data from Eastern European orphanages where there are insufficient staff to meet the contact-comfort needs of babies. Modern medicine now accepts as scientific fact the principle that babies need a great deal of physical touch and nurturing in order to thrive.

  In my experience, failure to thrive is not an all-or-none phenomenon, but rather a continuum that stretches from the abandonment depression to death. Many Cptsd survivors never thrived as babies. I believe that many suffered painful bouts of lingering near the end of the continuum that feels death-like. Several of my clients commonly have quipped that they “feel like death warmed over” when they are in a flashback.

  Moreover, I suspect that some traumatized children do die from their abandonment. Perhaps, their immune systems weaken and make them more susceptible to diseases. Perhaps, as David Kalshed hints, they unconsciously gravitate toward lethal “accidents” to terminate their misery.

  One of my clients reported this painful memory when we were processing a flashback that she was trapped in. She was ten, in a daze, and walk
ed out between two parked cars into traffic. She was hit by a truck and it took months of hospitalization to save her leg. Her most tearful re-experiencing of this event was remembering how she woke up in the hospital and felt tremendous disappointment that she was still alive.

  Emotional Hunger And Addiction

  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. Fortunately, many survivors eventually come to see their substance or process addictions as problematic. But many also minimize the deleterious effects of their addiction and jokingly dismiss their need to end or reduce their reliance on them.

  When the survivor has no understanding of the effects of trauma or no memory of being traumatized, addictions are often understandable, misplaced attempts to regulate painful emotional flashbacks. However many survivors are now in a position to see how self-destructive their addictions are. They are now old enough to learn healthier ways of self-soothing.