Complex PTSD Page 5

  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.

  Chapter 12 contains detailed instruction for enhancing mindfulness, as do the writings of Steven Levine, Jack Kornfield and John Kabat-Zinn.

  Finally, it is important to note that mindfulness tends to develop and expand in a progressive manner to all levels of our experience, cognitive, emotional, physical and relational. Mindfulness is essential for guiding us at every level of recovering, and we will examine this principle more closely throughout the book.

  EMOTIONAL HEALING

  Traumatizing parents do as much damage to our emotional natures as they do to our thinking processes. Consequently, there is a great deal of recovery work that needs to be done on this level. This is especially true because of the damage our wider society also does to our emotional natures.

  Recovering The Emotional Nature

  This section is an updated version of an article I wrote in 1991. I originally wrote it as a prelude to my first book, The Tao of Fully Feeling, and it was written as an appeal to the general public to understand the consequences of trying to sanitize one’s emotions. Thankfully, the response I received encouraged me to complete that book, which is a guide to overcoming the familial and societal damage meted out on children’s emotional life.

  The survivor, who is seeking a healthy relationship with his emotional being, will strive to accept the existential fact that the human feeling nature is often contradictory and frequently vacillates between opposite polarities of feeling experiences. It is quite normal for feelings to change unpredictably along continuums that stretch between a variety of emotional polarities. As such, it is especially human and healthy to have shifts of mood between such extremes as happy and sad, enthused and depressed, loving and angry, trusting and suspicious, brave and afraid, and forgiving and blaming.

  Unfortunately, in this culture only the “positive” polarity of any emotional experience is approved or allowed. This can cause such an avoidance of the “negative” polarity, that at least two different painful conditions result.

  In the first, the person injures and exhausts himself in compulsive attempts to avoid a disavowed feeling, and actually becomes more stuck in it. This is like the archetypal clown whose frantic efforts to free himself from a piece of fly paper, leave him more immobilized and entangled.

  In the second, repression of one end of the emotional continuum often leads to a repression of the whole continuum, and the person becomes emotionally deadened. The baby of emotional vitality is thrown out with the bathwater of some unacceptable feeling.

  A reluctance to participate in such a fundamental realm of the human experience results in much unnecessary loss. For just as without night there is no day, without work there is no play, without hunger there is no satiation, without fear there is no courage, without tears there is no joy, and without anger, there is no real love.

  Most people, who choose or are coerced into only identifying with “positive” feelings, usually wind up in an emotionally lifeless middle ground – bland, deadened, and dissociated in an unemotional “no-man’s-land.”

  Moreover, when a person tries to hold onto a preferred feeling for longer than its actual tenure, she often appears as unnatural and phony as ersatz grass or plastic flowers. If instead, she learns to surrender willingly to the normal human experience that good feelings always ebb and flow, she will eventually be graced with a growing ability to renew herself in the vital waters of emotional flexibility.

  The repression of the so-called negative polarities of emotion causes much unnecessary pain, as well as the loss of many essential aspects of the feeling nature. In fact, much of the plethora of loneliness, alienation, and addictive distraction that plagues modern industrial societies is a result of people being taught and forced to reject, pathologize or punish so many of their own and others’ normal feeling states.

  Nowhere, not in the deepest recesses of the self, or in the presence of his closest friends, is the average person allowed to have and explore any number of normal emotional states. Anger, depression, envy, sadness, fear, distrust, etc., are all as normal a part of life as bread and flowers and streets. Yet, they have become ubiquitously avoided and shameful human experiences.

  How tragic this is, for all of these emotions have enormously important and healthy functions in a wholly integrated psyche. One dimension where this is most true is in the arena of healthy self-protection. For without access to our uncomfortable or painful feelings, we are deprived of the most fundamental part of our ability to notice when something is unfair, abusive, or neglectful in our environments.

  Those who cannot feel their sadness often do not know when they are being unfairly excluded, and those who cannot feel their normal angry or fearful responses to abuse, are often in danger of putting up with it without protest.

  Perhaps never before has humankind been so alienated from so many of its normal feeling states, as it is in the twenty-first century. Never before have so many human beings been so emotionally deadened and impoverished.

  The disease of emotional emaciation is epidemic. Its effects on health are often euphemistically labeled as stress, and like the emotions, stress is often treated like some unwanted waste that must be removed.

  Until all of the emotions are accepted indiscriminately (and acceptance does not imply license to dump emotions irresponsibly or abusively), there can be no wholeness, no real sense of well being, and no solid sense of self esteem. Thus, while it may be fairly easy to like yourself when feelings of love or happiness or serenity are present, deeper psychological health is seen only when you can maintain a posture of self-love and self-respect in the times of emotional hurt that accompany life’s inevitable contingencies of loss, loneliness, confusion, uncontrollable unfairness, and accidental mistake.

  The human feeling experience, much like the weather, is often unpredictably changeable. No “positive” feeling can be induced to persist as a permanent experience, no matter what Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy tells us. As disappointing as this may be, as much as we might like to deny it, as much as it causes each of us ongoing life frustration, and as much as we were raised and continue to be reinforced for trying to control and pick our feelings, they are still by definition of the human condition, largely outside the province of our wills.

  EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

  Daniel Goleman defines emotional intelligence as our ability to successfully recognize and manage our own feelings and to healthily respond to the feelings of others. As implied above, I believe the quality of our emotional intelligence is reflected in the degree to which we accept all of our feelings without automatically dissociating from them or expressing them in a way that hurts ourselves or others. When we are emotionally intelligent we also extend this acceptance to our intimates. One of my clients calls this the hallmark of “relationships.”

  Another way of saying this is that I have self-esteem to the degree that I keep my heart open to myself in all my emotional states. And, I have intimacy when my friend and I offer this type of emotional acceptance to each other. Once again, this does not condone destructive expressions of anger which are, of course, counterproductive to trust and intimacy.

  Cptsd-engendering parents often hypocritically attack their children’s emotional expression in a bi-modal way. This occurs when the child is both abused for emoting and is, at the same time, abused by her caretaker’s toxic emotional expression.

  Most traumatizing parents are especially contemptuous towards the child’s expression of emotional pain. This contempt then forces the child’s all-important capacity for healthy grieving into developmental arrest.

  One archetypal example of this is seen in t
he parent who hurts his child to the point of tears, and then has the nerve to say: “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!” A client once told me that he often fantasized about giving his father this angry reply: “What are you talking about, you already gave me something to cry about?!” He did not, however, because he had long since learned that getting angry back was a capital crime that would elicit the most savage retaliation. Typically it would be delivered with homicidal rage: “I’ll knock you from here to Kingdom come!”

  The above is of course a blatant example of the slaughtering of emotional expression. Just as common is the insidious, passive-aggressive assault on emoting which is seen in the parent who shuns her child for expressing his feelings. This is seen in the emotionally abandoning parent who sequesters the child in a timeout for crying, or routinely retreats from the crying child into her room.

  The worst, most damaging example of this occurs when this is done to the pre-verbal toddler [or baby!] who only has emotions with which to express herself. Pre-verbal children are by definition far too young to learn the 2-3 year-olds’ developmental task of using her words to communicate about her feelings.

  An especially nasty form of emotional abuse occurs in the traumatizing family when the child is even attacked for displays of pleasant emotion. As I write this I flashback to scenes of my mother sneering at my little sister and snarling: “What are you so happy about!”, and my father’s frequent: “What are you laughing at – wipe that smile off your face!”

  Emotional abuse is also almost always also accompanied by emotional abandonment, which can most simply be described as a relentless lack of parental warmth and love. Sometimes this is most poignantly described as not being liked by your parents, which belies the many Cptsd-inducing parents who say they love their children, but demonstrate in a thousand ways that they do not like them. “The sight of you makes me sick” was very popular with such parents when I was growing up.

  It can still bring tears to my eyes to remember my emotionally abandoned young sister secreted in a corner of the house begging our family dog: “Like me, Ginger, Like me!”

  Toxic Shame And Soul Murder

  The rejecting responses of our parents to our emotional expression alienate us from our feelings. Emotional abuse/neglect scares us out of our own emotions while simultaneously making us terrified of other people’s feelings.

  John Bradshaw describes the devastation of the child’s emotional nature as “soul murder”. He explains this as involving a process where the child’s emotional expression [his first language of self-expression] is so assaulted with disgust that any emotional experience immediately devolves into toxic shame.

  I believe that toxic shame is the affect of the inner critic, and that inner critic thought-processes are the cognitions of shame – a terrible yin/yang process emanating from our original abandonment.

  Because of the deadly one-two punch of familial and societal attacks on our emotional selves, we need to recover our innate emotional intelligence. This is also deeply important because, as Carl Jung emphasized, our emotions tell us what is really important to us. When our emotional intelligence is restricted, we often do not know what we really want, and can consequently struggle mightily with even the smallest decisions.

  As emotional recovery progresses, the mindfulness described above begins to extend toward our emotional experience. This helps us to stop automatically dissociating from our feelings. We then learn to identify our feelings and choose healthy ways to respond to them and from them. Such emotional development illuminates our own natural preferences, and, in turn aids us in making easier and better choices.

  Towards the end of a long term therapy, a male client told me: “Yesterday, I was contemplating what I have discovered in the years of our work together, and I’m amazed at how much my values have shifted away from those of the macho family and culture I grew up in. I feel now like I prefer the arts to science, novels to non-fiction, gardening to watching golf, and hanging out with my partner at home to partying at the bar.”

  Grieving As Emotional Intelligence

  Grieving is the key process for reconnecting with our repressed emotional intelligence. Grieving reconnects us with our full complement of feelings. Grieving is necessary to help us release and work through our pain about the terrible losses of our childhoods. These losses are like deaths of parts of our selves, and grieving can often initiate their rebirth.

  Grieving And Verbal Ventilation

  Grieving restores our crucial, developmentally arrested capacity to verbally ventilate. Verbal ventilation is the penultimate grieving practice. It is speaking from your feelings in a way that releases and resolves your emotional distress.

  I believe the following description of a six panel cartoon visually conveys the powerful transformative power of verbal ventilation. In the first panel of the wordless cartoon, a woman with a dark cloud over her head is talking to a friend who has a shining sun over hers. In panel two, as the first woman gestures in a way that indicates complaining, the cloud covers her friend’s sun. In panel three, the cloud emits a bolt of lightning, as she angrily purges, and her friend glowers along with her. In panel four, the cloud rains on them as they embrace, commiserating in the rain of their shared tears. In panel 5, relief spreads over their faces as the cloud moves away from the sun. In panel 6 the sun shines over both of them, as they smile and slip into pleasant conversation.

  This cartoon reflects the fully realized power of verbal ventilation, which is the key bonding process in intimacy. It is also the key healing process of effective therapy, and here is an example of what verbally ventilating looks like in a therapy session.

  A client arrives flashbacked and in pain. He verbally ventilates about it. He is the regressed hurt child, feeling bad, and part of him is sad and part of him is mad. He is once again lost in the painful feelings of his original abandonment, and this state is like a death that responds well to grieving.

  As he lets his feelings come into his voice, he talks, cries and angers out his pain. Through this processing of his pain, he then gradually moves out of his flashback. He is restored to his normal everyday sense that he is no longer trapped in his traumatic childhood. Relief about this returns him to his normal ability to cope. If his grieving is deep enough, he customarily feels more hopeful and lighthearted. Not infrequently, his sense of humor resurfaces, and laughter punctuates his continuing verbal ventilation. This laughter is usually much different than the sarcastic, self-bullying humor of his critic that he might have begun the session with.

  The inner critic is sometimes so hostile to grieving that shrinking the critic may need to be your first recovery priority. Until the critic is sufficiently tamed, grieving can actually make flashbacks worse, rather than perform the restorative processes it alone can initiate.

  I have worked with numerous clients who were so traumatized around grieving that we needed to spend many months working on the cognitive level before grieving was released from the spoiling effects of the toxic critic. Chapter 11 provides a great deal of practical guidance for restoring your ability to grieve.

  SPIRITUAL HEALING

  Soothing Abandonment Losses Via A Higher Sense Of Belonging

  Spiritual beliefs are of course a subject of personal and sometimes private concern, and I believe and hope what I write here is not proselytizing. My aim, instead, is to point out psychological concepts that have a non-sectarian spiritual aspect. I am aware, however, that some survivors have suffered terrible spiritual abuse in childhood, and if the term “spiritual” is offensive or triggering in any way, please feel free to bypass this section. There are many other useful tools in this toolbox.

  A key aspect of the abandonment depression in Cptsd is the lack of a sense of belonging to humanity, life, anyone or anything. I have met many survivors whose first glimmer of “belonging” came to them on a quest that began as a spiritual pursuit. Finding nothing but betrayal in the realm of humans, they turned to the
spiritual for help.

  Spiritual pursuits are sometimes fueled by an unconscious hope of finding a sense of belonging. The worst thing that can happen to a child is to be unwelcomed in his family of origin - to never feel included. Moreover, many survivors have little or no experience of any social arena that feels safe and welcoming.

  Many survivors also do not find a sense of belonging in traditional or organized religions. Finding conventional religion too reminiscent of their dysfunctional families, some survivors look to more solitary spiritual approaches. They find a sense of belonging to something larger and more comforting by reading spiritual books or engaging in meditative practices. This also allows them to bypass the danger of direct human contact.

  Other survivors have spiritual experiences of belonging to something greater and worthwhile by being in nature, by listening to music or by appreciating the arts. I once marveled at a book, whose title now eludes me, that was a compendium of quotes from many renowned people who had numinous experiences through the direct perception of nature’s beauty.

  A numinous experience is a powerful moving feeling of well being accompanied by a sense that there is a positive, benign force behind the universe, as well as within yourself. This in turn sometimes brings enough grace with it, that you have a profound feeling that you are essentially worthwhile, that you belong in this life, and that life is a gift.

  One of my website respondents sent me her personal account of therapeutic gratitude. Her name is Mary Quinn [of Ireland]. In answer to my request to reprint her writing, she replied: “Yes, and in honor of my little one and for all the times her voice went unheard, you may use my name.”