Complex PTSD Read online

  Bob, himself, did not escape the pathological influence of his parents. Scapegoating became a habit for him, and he developed the narcissist’s sixth sense for identifying others whose families had victimized and used them as targets. Bob, hurting from his parents using him and holding him to perfectionistic standards, grew up to become a full-fledged narcissist and “control-freak”. He aggressively tried to mold his “loved” ones as he had been molded, and was working on whipping his fourth wife into shape at the time of Carol’s therapy.

  Let us return to Carol. As an adolescent, her trauma was painfully reinforced by her surrounding community who so admired her brother’s accomplishments, that they joined the family in pathologizing Carol as a “bad seed”.

  Unfortunately things deteriorated further for Carol as an adult, even though she had seemingly escaped from the family. Carol remained symbolically enthralled to the family by getting ensnared with narcissistic people who were just as abusive and neglectful as her parents. This well known psychological phenomenon is called repetition compulsion or reenactment, and trauma survivors are extremely susceptible to it. We will explore this extensively throughout the book.

  A third child, Maude, was born two years after Carol. By this time, her parents were worn out from incessantly molding Bob and Carol. Having whipped Bob and Carol into hero- and scapegoat-shape, they had little use for Maude. They did not have enough energy or interest left to whip her into anything.

  Maude became the classic lost child and was left on her own to raise herself. She soon discovered food and daydreaming as her sole sources of comfort. However, because Bob also enjoyed using her for target practice, she stayed in her room as much as possible.

  In retrospect, Carol also thought that Bob was molesting Maude. She hypothesized that these two factors contributed to the fact that Maude could not tolerate the various nurseries and pre-schools in which her mother tried to dump her. Over time, Maude numbed out into a low grade dissociative depression, and felt extremely anxious and avoidant whenever she was in a social situation.

  At four, an eccentric aunt gave Maude a television for her room and she was soon entranced. She was forced to develop an attachment disorder in which she bonded with TV rather than with a human being. Sadly, she is still lost in that relationship living on disability in an apartment cluttered with an enormous amount of useless hoarded material.

  Poor Parenting Creates Pathological Sibling Rivalry

  Like many children in Cptsd-engendering families, Maude could not turn to her siblings for comfort because her parents unconsciously practiced the “divide and conquer” principle. 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.

  Two years later, Sean was born. At first, it seemed as if he was destined for the same lost, dissociated destiny as Maude, but as he matured he fell into the role of “gifted child” as described by Alice Miller in The Drama of the Gifted Child.

  Sean’s inborn gift coming into this life was his compassion and his sense that if he studied his mother enough and figured out what she needed, he could provide for her needs. This would sometimes calm her down and make her less dangerous, bitter and sarcastic.

  Over the years Sean honed this skill and could almost clairvoyantly anticipate her sore spots, moods and preferences. Sometimes it seemed he knew what she needed before she did, and with practice he became adept at defusing her anger and sometimes even gaining morsels of her approval.

  Synchronistically, his mother realized she was getting old and that her alcohol-ravaged husband would likely precede her. Not wanting to be alone, she exploited his compassionate nature and primed him for domestic service for as long as she would need it. Sean remained living at home until his mother’s death released him from emotional captivity at the age of twenty-nine. This was the codependent enslavement we will explore more in chapter 7.

  A friend of Sean’s who knew all the siblings as adults, marveled that it seemed as if each had different parents.

  Finally, it is also important to note that the scapegoat role does not fall exclusively on the flight type as it did with Carol. It can be bestowed on anyone of the 4F types depending on the given family. The scapegoating role can also shift over time from one person to another and each parent or sibling may choose a different scapegoat.

  Chapters 6 and 7 explore each of the 4F’s and their corresponding defensive structures in greater detail. These chapters will also help you determine your key 4F defense, and help you address issues that are more specific to your type of Cptsd.

  LEVELS OF RECOVERING

  Healing from Complex PTSD is, above all, complex. This is important to emphasize because there are numerous one dimensional approaches to trauma that bill themselves as cure-alls. In my opinion, however, singular approaches are unable to address all the levels of wounding that combine to cause Cptsd.

  Moreover, working with simplistic approaches can leave you stranded in toxic shame when you do not achieve the touted results. I was motivated to write this book in large part because of the many times I sank into new levels of self-contempt when the latest panacea therapy did not cure me.

  I will use the word “key” repeatedly to describe the various tasks upon which recovering hinges. This book offers a keychain of perspectives and techniques to unlock yourself from being what Alice Miller called a “Prisoner of Childhood.”

  Abusive and abandoning parents can injure and abandon us on many levels: cognitive, emotional, spiritual, physical and relational. To recover, you need to learn how to support yourself – to meet your unmet developmental needs on each level that is relevant to your experience of childhood trauma.

  This chapter is a brief overview of the many tasks involved in Cptsd recovery. These tasks are explored at greater length in Part II. The comprehensive Table of Contents at the beginning of this book will direct you to further information on each of the topics covered in this chapter. Please allow yourself to also use the Table of Contents to explore sections of the book that peak your interest.

  Key Developmental Arrests In Cptsd

  What follows is a list of some of the most common developmental arrests that occur in Cptsd. You may find that you experience a diminishment or absence of these key features of healthy human being. Typically, survivors will vary on which and how many of these arrests relate to them. Factors affecting this are your 4F type, your childhood abuse/ neglect pattern, your innate nature and any recovery work that you have already accomplished.

  Self-acceptance

  Clear sense of identity

  Self-Compassion

  Self-Protection

  Capacity to draw comfort from relationship

  Ability to relax

  Capacity for full self-expression

  Willpower & Motivation

  Peace of mind

  Self-care

  Belief that life is a gift

  Self-esteem

  Self-confidence

  My efforts to nurture myself in these arrested areas of development were limited and spoiled in early recovery by a feeling of resentment. “Why do I have to do this?” was a common internal refrain. Resentment that should have been directed toward my parents often boomeranged onto me and spoiled or thwarted my efforts at self-nurturance.

  Thankfully ongoing recovery work helped remedy this resentment. It taught me to practice self-care in a spirit of giving to a child who needed and really deserved to be helped.

  I find it helpful to approach developmental arrests from the viewpoint of novelist David Mitchell’s quip that “…fire is the sun unwinding itself out of the wood”. Similarly, effective recovery is unwindin
g the natural potential you were born with out of your unconscious. This is your innate potential which may be, as yet, unrealized because of your childhood trauma.

  An especially tragic developmental arrest that afflicts many survivors is the loss of their will power and self-motivation. Many dysfunctional parents react destructively to their child’s budding sense of initiative. If this occurs throughout his childhood, the survivor may feel lost and purposeless in his life. He may drift through his whole life rudderless and without a motor.

  Moreover, even when he manages to identify a goal of his own choosing, he may struggle to follow through with extended and concentrated effort. Remedying this developmental arrest is essential because many new psychological studies now show that persistence – even more than intelligence or innate talent - is the key psychological characteristic necessary for finding fulfillment in life.

  I have worked with many survivors stranded in this form of adult helplessness. Those who recover from it typically do so by engaging extensively in the angering work of grieving that is discussed throughout this book. The ability to invoke willpower seems to be allied to your ability to healthily express your anger. With sufficient recovering, you can learn to manufacture your volition. In the beginning you can fake it until you make it. This is what Stephen Johnson calls “the hard work miracle.”

  What follows is a concluding comment about development arrests. Some survivors have confidence but not self-esteem. In childhood, my own flight response got channeled into acquiring academic skills for which the outside world rewarded me. But the benefit of these rewards never penetrated my toxic shame enough to allow me to feel that I was a worthwhile person.

  My critic, like my parents, always found something flawed in me to contradict the feedback that I was getting. Ninety-nine percent on a test was never a cause for pride. Rather, it was the impetus for a great deal of self-criticism about the missing one percent. Like many other survivors that I have worked with, I developed the imposter’s syndrome. This syndrome contradicted the outside positive feedback that I was receiving. It insisted that if people really knew me, they would see what a loser I was. Eventually, however, I became confident in my intelligence even though my self-esteem was still abysmal.

  COGNITIVE HEALING

  The first level of recovery usually involves repairing the damage that Cptsd wreaks on our thoughts and beliefs about ourselves.

  Cognitive recovery work aims to make your brain user friendly. It focuses on recognizing and eliminating the destructive thoughts and thinking processes you were indoctrinated with in childhood.

  Cognitive healing also depends on learning to choose healthy and more accurate ways of talking to and thinking about yourself. On the broadest level, this involves upgrading the story you tell yourself about your pain.

  We need to understand exactly how appalling parenting created the now self-perpetuating trauma that we live in. We can learn to do this in a way that takes the mountain of unfair self-blame off ourselves. We can redirect this blame to our parents’ dreadful child-rearing practices. And we can also do this in a way that motivates us to reject their influence so that we can freely orchestrate our journey of recovering.

  This work then requires us to build a fierce allegiance to ourselves. Such loyalty strengthens us for the cognitive work of freeing our brains from being conditioned to attack so many normal parts of our selves.

  Cognitive work is fundamental to helping you disidentify from the self-hating critic with which your parents inculcated you. As I am writing this, my son’s friend synchronistically tells him: “This Lego creature I made spreads brain attack and eats away at the person.” I marvel at this synchronicity and think: “What a fitting image for the trauma-inducing parent”.

  Shrinking The Critic

  Early abuse and abandonment forces the child to merge his identity with the superego, the part of the child’s brain that learns the rules of his caretakers in order to get and maintain acceptance. However, because acceptance is impossible in the Cptsd-engendering family, the superego gets stuck working overtime to achieve the impossible. Perseverating on finding a formula to win over her parents, the child eventually embraces perfectionism as a strategy to make her parents less dangerous and more engaging. Her one hope is that if she becomes smart, helpful, pretty, and flawless enough, her parents will finally care for her.

  Sadly, continued failure at winning their regard forces her to conclude that she is fatally flawed. She is loveless not because of her mistakes, but because she is a mistake. She can only see what is wrong with or missing in her.

  Anything she does, says, thinks, imagines or feels has the potential to spiral her down into a depressed abyss of fear and toxic shame. Her superego fledges into a full-blown, trauma-inducing critic.

  Self-criticism, then, runs non-stop in a desperate attempt to avoid rejection-inducing mistakes. Drasticizing becomes obsessive to help the child foresee and avoid punishment and worsening abandonment. At the same time, it continuously fills her psyche with stories and images of catastrophe.

  The survivor becomes imprisoned by a jailer who will accept nothing but perfection. He is chauffeured by a hysterical driver who sees nothing but danger in every turn of the road. Chapters 9 and 10 focus extensively on practical tools for shrinking your critic.

  The Developmentally Arrested Healthy Ego

  Over time the critic becomes more and more synonymous with the survivor’s identity. The superego morphs into a totalitarian critic that trumps the development of a healthy ego. [The ego develops later than the superego.]

  “Ego”, contrary to popular usage, is not a dirty word. In psychology, the term ego represents what we typically mean when we use terms like my “self” or my identity. The healthy ego is the user friendly manager of the psyche. Unfortunately, Cptsd-inducing parents thwart the growth of the ego by undermining the development of the crucial egoic processes of self-compassion and self-protection.

  They do this by shaming or intimidating you whenever you have a natural impulse to have sympathy for yourself, or stand up for yourself. The instinct to care for yourself and to protect yourself against unfairness is then forced to become dormant.

  Psychoeducation And Cognitive Healing

  Becoming psychoeducated about Cptsd is the first level of addressing this poisonous indoctrination of your mind against your healthy ego. When you intricately understand how antagonistic your parents were to your healthy sense of self, you become more motivated to engage in the self-help processes of rectifying their damage. The more you identify their damage the more you know what to fix.

  This is essential because without a properly functioning ego, you have no center for making healthy choices and decisions. All too often, your decisions are based on the fear of getting in trouble or getting abandoned, rather than on the principles of having meaningful and equitable interactions with the world.

  You can learn to gradually replace the critic’s toxic perspective with a viewpoint that supports you in your life, and that stops you from unnecessarily scaring yourself.

  You are free now as an adult to develop peace of mind and a supportive relationship with yourself. A self-championing stance can transform your existence from struggling survival to a fulfilling sense of thriving.

  You can begin right now by inviting your instincts of self-compassion and self-protection to awaken and bloom in your life.

  Cognitive healing may have begun or been reinforced by reading what has preceded this. Hopefully you are having some epiphanies about what is at the core of your suffering.

  Some readers may have been searching for cognitive answers for years, and through their reading and therapy already created a sizable foundation for doing this work.

  At the same time, those who have only tried a Cognitive-Behavioral Approach [CBT] to healing their trauma may feel great resistance to hearing that cognitive work is important. If you are like me, you may have been introduced to it in a way that promised more than
could be delivered. Cognitive tools are irreplaceable in healing cognitive issues, but they do not address all the levels of our wounding. They are especially limited in addressing emotional issues, as we will see below.

  In early recovery, the psychoeducation piece of cognitive work typically comes from the wisdom of others: teachers, writers, friends and therapists who are more informed on this subject than we are. When psychoeducation reaches its most powerful level of effectiveness, however, it begins to morph into mindfulness.

  MINDFULNESS

  Psychologically speaking, mindfulness is taking undistracted time to become fully aware of your thoughts and feelings so that you can have more choice in how you respond to them. Do I really agree with this thought, or have I been pressured into believing it? How do I want to respond to this feeling – distract myself from it, repress it, express it or just feel it until it changes into something else?

  Mindfulness is a perspective that weds your capacity for self-observation with your instinct of self-compassion. It is therefore your ability to observe yourself from an objective and self-accepting viewpoint. It is a key function of a healthily developed ego and is sometimes described as the observing ego or the witnessing self.

  Mindfulness is a perspective of benign curiosity about all of your inner experience. Recovery is enhanced immeasurably by developing this helpful process of introspection. As it becomes more developed, mindfulness can be used to recognize and dis-identify from beliefs and viewpoints that you acquired from your traumatizing family.