Complex PTSD Page 11

Accordingly, substance and process addictions can be seen as misguided attempts to distract from inner pain. The desire to reduce such habits can therefore be used as motivation to learn the more sophisticated forms of self-soothing that Cptsd recovery work has to offer.

  As we will see in chapter 11, grieving work offers us irreplaceable tools for working through inner pain. This then helps obviate the need to harmfully distract ourselves from our pain.

  The Evolutionary Basis Of Attachment Needs

  The human brain evolved during the Hunter-Gatherer era that represents 99.8% of our time on this planet. For a child, safety from predators during these times depended on being in very close proximity to an adult. Even the briefest loss of contact with a parental figure could trigger panicky feelings as beasts of prey only needed seconds to snatch away an unprotected child.

  Fear hard-wired in the child as a healthy response to separation from a protective adult. Fear also linked automatically with the fight response so that the infant and toddler would automatically cry angrily for attention, help, and cessation of abandonment.

  Cptsd-inducing families however loathe angry crying, and many can find professionals to back them up for routinely leaving babies and very young children to “cry it out” on their own.

  In most dysfunctional families, parents disdain children for needing any kind of help or attention at all. Moreover, even the most well-intentioned parent can seriously neglect their children by subscribing to the egregious 20th century “wisdom” that “Kids need quality time - quantity does not matter.”

  When children experience long periods of being powerless to obtain needed connection with a parent, they become increasingly anxious, upset and depressed. In Cptsd-engendering families, the absence of care and concern is extreme. A caretaker is rarely or never available for support, comfort or protection.

  If this is what you suffered, 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.

  When caretakers turn their backs on a child’s need for help and support, her inner world becomes an increasingly nightmarish amalgam of fear, shame and depression. The child who is abandoned in this way experiences the world as a terrifying place.

  Over time the child’s dominant experience of herself is so replete with emotional pain and so unmanageable that that she has to dissociate, self-medicate, act out [aggression against others] or act in [aggression against the self] to distract from it.

  The situation of the abandoned child further deteriorates as an extended absence of warmth and protection gives rise to the cancerous growth of the inner critic as described above. The child projects his hope for being accepted onto self-perfection. By the time the child is becoming self-reflective, cognitions start to arise that sound like this: “I’m so despicable, worthless, unlovable, and ugly; maybe my parents would love me if I could make myself like those perfect kids I see on TV.”

  In this way, the child becomes hyperaware of imperfections and strives to become flawless. Eventually she roots out the ultimate flaw – the mortal sin of wanting or asking for her parents’ time or energy. Intrinsic to this process is noticing – more and more hyper-vigilantly - how her parents turn their back or become angry or disgusted whenever she needs anything, whether it be attention, listening, interest, or affection.

  Emotional neglect, alone, causes children to abandon themselves, and to give up on the formation of a self. They do so to preserve an illusion of connection with the parent and to protect themselves from the danger of losing that tenuous connection. This typically requires a great deal of self-abdication, e.g., the forfeiture of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-care, self-interest, and self-protection.

  Moreover, endangerment programs proliferate in the critic as the child learns that he cannot ask his parent to protect him from dangers and injustices in the outside world, never mind in the home. His only recourse is to become hypervigilant about things that can go wrong. His critic compiles lists of possible calamities, especially those that are graphically portrayed in the media.

  The media gives the critic of the abandoned child much fodder to play with. She may be exposed daily to hours of programs that glorify sarcasm, backbiting and bullying. Moreover news programs, with a ninety percent content of bad news, fill her head with impressions that the world is predominantly hostile and dangerous. Even worse, emotionally neglectful parents commonly abandon their children to their favorite babysitter – the TV.

  Through such neglect the child’s consciousness eventually becomes overwhelmed with the processes of drasticizing and catastrophizing. Drasticizing and catastrophizing are critic processes that lead the child to constantly rehearse fearful scenarios in a vain attempt to prepare himself for the worst. This is the process by which Cptsd with its overdeveloped stress and toxic shame programs sets in and becomes triggerable by a plethora of normally innocuous stimuli.

  Most notable of these stimuli are other people, especially unknown people or people even vaguely reminiscent of the parents. Over time, the critic comes to assume that all other people are dangerous and automatically triggers the fight, flight, freeze or fawn response whenever a stranger or unproven other comes into view.

  This people-are-dangerous process typically devolves into the social anxiety that is frequently a symptom of Cptsd. In worst case scenarios it manifests as social phobia and agoraphobia. In my opinion, agoraphobia is rarely the fear of open spaces. It is instead a disguised form of social phobia. It is the fear of going out lest you run into someone or anyone.

  Abandonment Stultifies Emotional And Relational Intelligence

  As stated above, 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.

  Emotional intelligence and its cohort, relational intelligence, are forced into developmental arrest by abandoning parents. Children never learn that a relationship with a healthy person can be comforting and enriching. The ability to open to and benefit from love and caring from others often lays dormant and undeveloped.

  Moreover, the appropriate management of the normal emotions that recurrently arise in significant relationships is never modeled for them. Emotional intelligence about the healthy and functional aspects of anger, sadness, and fear lies fallow.

  De-Minimizing Emotional Abandonment

  As with physical abuse, effective work on the wounds of verbal and emotional abuse can sometimes open the door to de-minimizing the awful impact of emotional neglect. I sometimes feel the most for my clients who were “only” neglected, because it is so difficult to see neglect as hard core evidence. Most people remember little before they were four years old. And by that time, much of this kind of damage is done. It typically takes some very deep introspective work, to realize that current time flashback pain is a re-creation of how bad it felt to be emotionally abandoned.

  The remembering and de-minimizing of the impact of emotional neglect can take a long time. It is typically an intuitive piecing together of a lot of clues. The puzzle is often solved when a critical mass of childhood reconstruction is reached. Sometimes this fosters an epiphany that neglect is indeed at the core of present time suffering. Sometimes this epiphany brings a great relieving certainty that fragile self-esteem, frequent flashbacks, and recurring reenactments of unsupportive relationships were caused by the close
d hearts of your parents.

  I sometimes regret that I did not know what I now know about this kind of neglect when I wrote my first book. I wish I had not over-focused on the role of abuse in my childhood trauma. It is so hard to convey this to a client whose critic minimizes and shames them for their plight by comparing them unfavorably to me: “I didn’t have it anywhere near as bad as you. My mother never hit me!”

  How ironic that this typically invokes a feeling-sense in me that the worst thing that happened to me, by far, was growing up so emotionally abandoned. In fact, it was not until I learned to assign the pain of numerous current time emotional flashbacks to the abject loneliness of my childhood, that I was able to work effectively on the repetition compulsion that lead me into so many neglectful relationships.

  And once again this is not to deny or minimize the C-ptsd-inducing traumatization that does come from each and every type of abuse; physical, sexual, verbal and emotional.

  Practicing Vulnerability

  Emotional abandonment is healed by the type of real intimacy that we have been discussing. And once again real intimacy depends on us showing up in times of vulnerability. Deep-level recovering occurs when we successfully connect with a safe enough other during the flashbacked-times of feeling trapped in the fear, shame and depression of the abandonment mélange.

  In this vein, I had to painstakingly practice showing up in my pain for years. At first I could only do this infrequently. I was too habituated to my childhood default positions of hiding or camouflaging with substances whenever I was in the grip of the abandonment mélange. Yet I drew strength to increase my practice from a growing distaste for the social perfectionism of my people-pleasing codependence. 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.

  And of course, like most survivors, I was ignorant at first that I was even experiencing the emotional pain of the abandonment mélange. How could I help but conceal it?

  Moreover, even after considerable de-minimization of my childhood abuse/neglect picture, I was still convinced that everyone but my therapist would find me abhorrent if I shared about my flashback feelings. Furthermore, my trust of my therapist also wavered quite a bit at first, especially during my deepest flashbacks.

  Gratefully, sufficient positive experiences with my therapist eventually emboldened me to bring my authentic vulnerability to other select and gradually proven relationships, where I found the acceptance, safety and support that, previously, I would not have known to wish for.

  There are limitations of the analogy of the onion. Later recovery does typically involve working at various levels at the same time. De-minimization is a lifetime process. Revisiting a central issue of our abandonment picture sometimes impacts us even more deeply than it did at first.

  One such occasion left me reeling with the certain knowledge that getting hit felt preferable to being abandoned for long hours outside my depressed mother’s locked bedroom door. I would pound on the door even though I knew she would explode because I just could not bear the isolation. I have known about the latter for quite some time now and yet writing about it brings up some new bitter-sweet tears.

  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.

  In my latest experience of this type of grieving my sweet tears came from realizing that I do regularly experience good enough love and safety in relationship. And then my tears were bitter again because I can still emotionally flashback to that bereft state of feeling stranded from the comfort of others, even occasionally from my wife and son. And then my tears were sweet again because my flashbacks are so much easier to handle these days, especially as I increasingly master the use of the tools I describe in chapter 8.

  The Power Of Narrative

  There is also growing evidence that recovery from Complex PTSD is reflected in the narrative a person tells about her life. The degree of recovery matches the degree to which a survivor’s story is complete, coherent, and emotionally congruent and told from a self-sympathetic perspective.

  In my experience, deep level recovery is often reflected in a narrative that highlights the role of emotional neglect in describing what one has suffered and what one continues to deal with.

  My client, Matt, peeled a large layer off his onion of denial and minimization two days before Mother’s Day. He came into his session in a terrible flashback. “Life sucks and I suck even more. I couldn’t even do something as simple as pick out a Mother’s Day card.”

  Fortunately, Matt had achieved a great deal of de-minimization since the previous Mother’s Day when he thought his mother was a good mother because she had never hit him. Now however, he was heavily triggered by spending an hour in a card shop unable to find a card that he could send to his mother. As we explored this further, we discovered that the sentiments written in every card made him feel like he would be betraying his inner child if he sent it.

  “I tell you, Pete, not one of those cards describes something that I could be grateful for. I don’t have one memory of anything nice she ever said or did for me!” Before long, he was deep into grieving about how little mothering he had received from his mother.

  He cried and angered about the scornful look and the sarcastic tone of voice that so characterized his interactions with her. “Why did I have to get such a bad deal from the mothering deck?!”

  Towards the end of the session, as often happens with healthy grieving, he felt his flashback resolve and was restored to feeling like he was once again on his own side. The relief of being out of the flashback also allowed his healthy sense of humor to return.

  He started riffing: “I’m going to start a greeting card business for people like me. I’m going to make a line of cards for people with dysfunctional mothers. How about this? ‘Thanks Mom for never knowing what grade I was in’; or ‘Thanks Mom for all the memories of you walking away whenever I was hurting’; or ‘Thanks Mom for teaching me how to only notice what was wrong me’; or ‘Thanks Mom for teaching me how to frown at myself in self-disgust.’”

  Understanding how profoundly derelict your parents were in their duty to nurture and protect you is a master key to your recovery. 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. This, then, helps you to reverse the childhood-survival habit of automatic self-abandonment. In turn, this can further motivate you to identify and address the many ways you were abused and/or neglected. Chapter 8 of my book, The Tao of Fully Feeling, provides detailed guidelines for assessing and remediating your abuse/neglect picture.

  Finally, it is an empowering accomplishment to really get the profound significance of childhood emotional neglect. It is often flashback-resolving to realize in the moment that a flashback into bewilderment and hopelessness is an emotional reliving of your childhood trauma. Like nothing else, this can generate a self-protective impulse toward your child-self and your present-time self, kick-starting the process of resolving any given flashback.

  WHAT IS MY TRAUMA TYPE?


  This chapter describes a trauma typology for recognizing and recovering from the different types of Cptsd. We human beings respond with some variability to childhood trauma. This model elaborates four basic survival strategies and defensive styles that develop out of our instinctive Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn responses.

  Variances in your childhood abuse/neglect pattern, birth order and genetics result in you gravitating toward a specific 4F survival strategy. You do this as a child to prevent, escape or ameliorate further traumatization. Fight types develop a narcissistic-like defense. Flight types develop an obsessive/compulsive-like defense. Freeze types develop a dissociative-like defense. Fawn types develop a codependent-like defense.

  Healthy Employment Of The 4 F’s

  People who experience “good enough parenting” in childhood arrive in adulthood with a healthy and flexible response repertoire to danger. In the face of real danger, they have appropriate access to all of their 4F choices.

  Easy access to the fight response insures good boundaries, healthy assertiveness and aggressive self-protectiveness if necessary.

  Untraumatized people also easily and appropriately access their flight instinct and disengage and retreat when confrontation would exacerbate their danger.

  Untraumatized people also freeze appropriately and give up and quit struggling when further activity or resistance is futile or counterproductive. Additionally, the freeze response is sometimes our first response to danger, as when we become still, quiet and camouflaged to buy time, to assess the danger and decide whether fight, flight, continued freeze or fawn is our best option.

  And finally, untraumatized people also fawn in a non-groveling manner and are able to listen, help, and compromise as readily as they assert and express themselves and their needs, rights and points of view. A deeper elaboration of the origins of these four defenses is found below and in the next chapter.