Complex PTSD Page 12

  POSITIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOUR F’S

  Those who are repetitively traumatized in childhood often learn to survive by over-using one or two of the 4F Reponses. Fixation in any one 4F response not only limits our ability to access all the others, but also severely impairs our ability to relax into an undefended state. Additionally, it strands us in a narrow, impoverished experience of life.

  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. Preoccupation with 4F behaviors dulls our awareness of our unresolved past trauma and the pain of our current alienation.

  This chart compares the harmful behaviors of each defensive structure. Real or imagined danger typically triggers us into these roles and behaviors when we are in an emotional flashback.

  DETRIMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE 4F DEFENSES

  CPTSD AS AN ATTACHMENT DISORDER

  Excessive reliance on a fight, flight, freeze or fawn response is the traumatized child’s unconscious attempt to cope with constant danger. It is also a strategy to strengthen the illusion that her parents really care about her.

  In adult life, all 4F types are commonly ambivalent about real intimacy. This is because closeness often triggers us into painful emotional flashbacks. It reminds us of how we had to survive without comforting connection in childhood. Our 4F defenses therefore offer protection against further re-abandonment by precluding the type of vulnerable relating that leads to deeper bonding.

  A survivor also avoids vulnerable relating because his past makes him believe that he will be attacked or abandoned as he was in childhood. This is why showing vulnerability often triggers painful emotional flashbacks.

  Many fight types avoid real intimacy by alienating others with their angry and controlling demands for unconditional love. This unrealistic demand to have their unmet childhood needs met destroys the possibility of intimacy. Moreover, some fight types delude themselves into believing that they are perfect. They see the other as the one who needs to be perfected. This defensive belief then entitles them to totally blame their partners for relationship problems.

  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.

  Many freeze types hide away in their rooms and reveries fully convinced that the world of relating holds nothing for them. Freeze type who have not been totally turned off relationships by horrible childhood neglect or abuse, gravitate to online relationships. Online relating can be pursued safely at home with as little contact as desired.

  Many fawn types avoid emotional investment and potential disappointment by barely showing themselves. They hide behind their helpful personas and over-listen, over-elicit and/or overdo for the other. By over-focusing on their partners, they then do not have to risk real self-exposure and the possibility of deeper level rejection.

  This chart compares and contrasts the differences between the four types.

  4F DISTORTIONS OF ATTACHMENT AND SAFETY INSTINCTS

  Now let us examine each of the 4F defenses more closely with a view toward decreasing our overreliance on them.

  THE FIGHT TYPE AND THE NARCISSISTIC DEFENSE

  Fight types are unconsciously driven by the belief that power and control can create safety, assuage abandonment and secure love. Children who are spoiled and given insufficient limits [a uniquely painful type of abandonment] can become fight types. Children who are allowed to imitate the bullying of a narcissistic parent may also develop a habitual fight response. Numerous fight types start out as older siblings who over-power their younger siblings just as their parent over-powers them.

  Fight types learn to respond to their feelings of abandonment with anger. Many use contempt, a poisonous blend of narcissistic rage and disgust, to intimidate and shame others into mirroring them. Narcissists treat others as if they are as extensions of themselves.

  The entitled fight type commonly uses others as an audience for his incessant monologing. He may treat a “captured” freeze or fawn type as a slave in a dominance-submission relationship. The price of admission to a relationship with an extreme narcissist is self-annihilation. One of my clients quipped: “Narcissists don’t have relationships; they take prisoners.”

  The Charming Bully

  Especially devolved fight types can become sociopathic. Sociopathy can range along a continuum that stretches from corrupt politician to vicious criminal. A particularly nasty sociopath, who I call the charming bully, probably falls somewhere around the middle of this continuum. The charming bully behaves in a friendly manner some of the time. He can even occasionally listen and be helpful in small amounts, but he still uses his contempt to overpower and control others.

  This type typically relies on scapegoats for the dumping of his vitriol. These unfortunate scapegoats are typically weaker than him. They may be members of a disenfranchised group: the “ethnic” employees, the gays, women, his “problem” child or wife, etc. He generally spares his favorites from this behavior, unless they get out of line.

  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.

  I remember how perplexed I used to be at photos of Hitler ostensibly acting kindly to his children. And 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.

  The “great” icon, Henry Ford, would regularly place new young workers at the front of his “innovative” assembly lines. The tired, used-up workers further down the line who could not then keep up were unceremoniously ushered out the back door. Labor unions eventually curtailed that practice in this country, but many jobs have since been exported to unregulated third world countries where workers labor in the same atrocious soul- and body-destroying conditions.

  And then, on a much less grand level, I remember a best friend I had in my twenties. I thought he was a great guy for almost two years until one day, shopping in the supermarket with him, I witnessed his demeaning lambasting of an innocent checker just out of sheer spite.

  Other Types Of Narcissists

  Rageaholic narcissists are infamous for using other people as dumping grounds for their anger. They are addicted to the emotional release of catharting in this way. The relief often does not last long before they are looking for another fix of venting their spleen.

  This type of narcissism is pure bullying, and bullying alone can cause ptsd. If it goes on long enough as it does with bullying parents in a dysfunctional family, it can cause Cptsd. If this rings a bell with you, please check out www.nobully.com .

  Furthermore, and closer to a key theme of this book, I report the evidence of more than a few clients who were horribly abused by their pillar-of-the-community, narcissistic parents. Among them is my suave silent-type father, who regularly raged at and backhanded me and my sisters. He was much admired in our neighborhood.

  A final example of narcissism is the charming narcissist who is not necessarily a bully. I call this type the narcissist in codependent clothing. My friend’s father is this type of charming narcissist. When you meet him, he lures you in with questions and elicitation that make you feel like he is interested in you. But, within a few minutes [once you have ta
ken the bait], he suddenly shifts into monologing like a filibusterer. This particular type often masters the run-on sentence and there is nary a pause to interject or even offer an excuse for escaping. You have become a captive audience and your release will not be procured easily.

  Recovering From A Polarized Fight Response

  I agree with the widely held notion that extreme narcissists and sociopaths are untreatable. Typically they are convinced that they themselves are perfect and that everyone else the problem.

  Fight types who are not true narcissists, however, benefit from understanding the costly price they pay for controlling others with intimidation, criticism and sarcasm. Some who I worked with eventually saw how their aggressive behavior scared away their potential intimates. One survivor also realized that although her partner stayed, he was so afraid and resentful of her demandingness and irritability, that he could not manifest the warmth or real liking that she so desperately desired.

  I have also helped a number of fight types understand the downward spiral of power and alienation that comes from being over-controlling. It looks like this: excessive use of power triggers a fearful emotional withdrawal in the other, which makes the fight type feel even more abandoned. In turn, he becomes more outraged and contemptuous, which then further distances his “intimate”. This once again increases the fight type’s rage and disgust, which then creates increasing distance and the withholding of warmth, ad infinitum.

  Fight types benefit from learning to redirect their rage toward the awful childhood circumstances that caused them to adopt such an intimacy-destroying defense. This can help them to deconstruct their habits of instantly morphing abandonment feelings into rage and disgust.

  As the recovering fight type becomes more conscious of his abandonment feelings, he can learn to release his fear and shame with tears. 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.

  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. This is the work of shrinking the Outer Critic as we will see in chapter 10.

  Fight types also benefit from learning to take self-initiated timeouts whenever they notice that they are triggered and feeling overcritical. Timeouts can then be used to redirect the lion’s share of their hurt feelings into grieving and working through their original abandonment, rather than displacing it destructively onto current intimates.

  Furthermore, like all 4F fixations, fight types need to become more flexible and adaptable in using the other 4F responses. If you are a recovering fight type, it will especially benefit you to learn the empathy response of the fawn position. Begin by trying to imagine how it feels to be the person you are interacting with. Do it as much as you can. Moreover, you can expand on this by developing mindfulness about the needs, rights and feelings of those with whom you would like to have real intimacy.

  In early recovery you can “fake it until you make it.” For without practicing consideration for the other, and without reciprocity and dialogicality [as opposed to monologing], the intimacy you crave will allude you.

  THE FLIGHT TYPE AND THE OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DEFENSE

  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.

  Left-Brain Dissociation

  When the obsessive/compulsive flight type is not doing, she is worrying and planning about doing. She becomes what John Bradshaw calls a Human Doing [as opposed to a Human Being.] Obsessiveness is left-brain dissociation, as opposed to the classic right-brain dissociation of the freeze type described below.

  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.

  As a flight type myself, I sometimes find myself obsessively worrying through my outline just before a lecture. I do it, in part, to stay buoyant above my performance anxiety [a subset of my abandonment fear]. In my early days of teaching I would also employ a compulsive defense and pace as I anxiously searched my brain for a missing word. Sometimes I would even scramble frantically through the dictionary or thesaurus to find it. Unconsciously it was like I was searching for a safe place beyond the gravity of my anxiety.

  Flight types are also prone to becoming addicted to their own adrenalin. Some recklessly and regularly pursue risky and dangerous activities to jumpstart an adrenalin-high. Flight types are also susceptible to the process addictions of workaholism and busy-holism. To keep these processes humming, they can deteriorate into stimulating substance addictions.

  Severely traumatized flight types may devolve into obsessive-compulsive disorder [OCD].

  Recovering From A Polarized Flight Response

  The flight types that I have worked with are so busy trying to stay one step ahead of their pain that introspecting out loud in the therapy hour is the only time they find for self-examination. Learning about the 4F model often helps them to renounce the perfectionistic demands of the inner critic.

  I gently and repetitively focus on confronting their denial and minimization about the costs of perfectionism. This is especially important with workaholics who often admit their addiction but secretly hold onto it as a badge of pride and superiority.

  Flight types can get “stuck in their head” by being over-analytical. Once a critical mass of understanding Cptsd is achieved, it is crucial for them to start moving into their feelings. Sooner or later, they must deepen their work by grieving about their childhood losses.

  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.

  If you are a flight type, there are a plethora of self-help books, CD’s and classes that can help you learn to relax and decrease the habit of habitual doing. This is so essential because you can get so lost in busyness, that you have difficulty seeing the forest from the trees. This makes you prone to prioritizing the wrong tasks and getting lost in inessential activities. When I am triggered, I often feel pulled to busy myself with the simplest and easiest tasks, sometimes losing sight of my key responsibilities.

  In flashback, flight types can deteriorate into chicken-with-its-head-cut-off mode, as fear and anxiety propel them into scattered activity. Spinning their wheels, they can rush about aimlessly, as if motion itself is the only thing important.

  At such times the flight type can rescue himself from panicky flight by inverting an old cliché into: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” And, by stand there I mean stop and take some time to become centered - and to re-prioritize. To accomplish this I recommend three minute, mini-chair meditations. If you are a flight type, you can enhance your recovery greatly by giving yourself a few of these each day. You can start a chair meditation
by closing your eyes. Gently ask your body to relax. Feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. Breathe deeply and slowly.

  When you have relaxed your muscles and deepened and slowed your breathing, ask yourself: “What is my most important priority right now? What is the most beneficial thing I can do next?”

  As you get more proficient at this and can manage sitting for a longer time, try the question: “What hurt am I running from right now? Can I open my heart to the idea and image of soothing myself in my pain?”

  Finally, there are numerous flight types who exhibit symptoms that may be misdiagnosed as Cyclothymia, a minor bipolar disorder. This issue is addressed at length in chapter 12.

  THE FREEZE TYPE AND THE DISSOCIATIVE DEFENSE

  The freeze response, also known as the camouflage response, often triggers a survivor into hiding, isolating and avoiding human contact. The freeze type can be so frozen in the retreat mode that it seems as if their starter button is stuck in the “off” position.

  Of all the 4F’s, freeze types seem to have the deepest unconscious belief that people and danger are synonymous. While all 4F types commonly suffer from social anxiety as well, freeze types typically take a great deal more refuge in solitude. Some freeze types completely give up on relating to others and become extremely isolated. Outside of fantasy, many also give up entirely on the possibility of love.