Complex PTSD Read online

  Self-mothering can be enhanced by thought-correcting the critic’s negative messages with healing words that the child in all likelihood never heard from his parents. A client of mine once shared this pearl of wisdom with me: “Thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries - as good for you as sunlight is, or as bad for you as poison.”

  Here then are some useful messages for nurturing the growth of your self-compassion and self-esteem. I recommend that you imagine speaking them to your inner child, especially when you are suffering with a flashback.

  Reparenting Affirmations

  I am so glad you were born.

  You are a good person.

  I love who you are and am doing my best to always be on your side.

  You can come to me whenever you’re feeling hurt or bad.

  You do not have to be perfect to get my love and protection.

  All of your feelings are okay with me.

  I am always glad to see you.

  It is okay for you to be angry and I won’t let you hurt yourself or others when you are.

  You can make mistakes - they are your teachers.

  You can know what you need and ask for help.

  You can have your own preferences and tastes.

  You are a delight to my eyes.

  You can choose your own values.

  You can pick your own friends, and you don’t have to like everyone.

  You can sometimes feel confused and ambivalent, and not know all the answers.

  I am very proud of you.

  Self-Fathering And Time Machine Rescue Operation

  Many abandoned children enter adulthood feeling that the world is a dangerous place where they are ill-equipped to defend themselves. While self-mothering focuses primarily on healing the wounds of neglect, self-fathering heals the wounds of being helpless to protect yourself from parental abuse, and by extension from other abusive authority figures.

  Self-fathering aims at building assertiveness and self-protection. It includes learning to effectively confront external and/or internal abuse, as well as standing up for the adult child’s rights, as described in Tool Box 2 of chapter 16. Many survivors benefit greatly from classes and books on assertiveness training.

  One of my favorite self-fathering exercises is the time machine rescue operation. I have used it to help myself and to help clients. With clients I use it to model a process for fighting off the overwhelming sense of helplessness that often accompanies emotional flashbacks.

  This is a version of the time machine rescue operation that I use with myself as well as with my clients. I tell my inner child that, if time travel is ever possible, I will travel back into the past and put a stop to my parents’ abusiveness. In the course of this I say things like: “I’ll call 911. I’ll call CPS [Child Protective Services] on them. I will grab their arms and pin them behind their backs the second they try to strike you. I will muffle them with a gag so they can’t scream at you or even mumble their criticisms. I’ll put bags over their heads so they can’t frown or glare at you. I’ll send them to bed without dessert. I’ll do anything you want me to do to protect you.”

  Such imagery often provides me an exit out of fear and shame, and sometimes even makes my inner child laugh in delight. I sometimes finish this exercise by telling my inner child I would also report my parents to the authorities so they would be sent to counseling to learn how to be a better parent.

  Or, I say that, if I could, I would take him back to live with me in the future before all those horrible things could happen to him. I remind him that he in fact lives in the present with me now, where I will always do my best to protect him. We now have a powerful body, greater skills of self-protection and access to allies and a legal system that will protect us.

  When the recoveree consistently welcomes his inner child in every aspect of his being, the child feels increasingly safe and becomes more and more alive and self-expressive. As he experiences his adult self consistently rising to his defense, he will feel safe enough to begin accessing his innate vitality, playfulness, curiosity, and spontaneity.

  Reparenting By Committee

  Reparenting at its best is a yin/yang dynamic that balances the mutually enhancing processes of reparenting by others and self-reparenting. Reparenting sometimes needs to be initiated and modeled by someone else, such as a therapist, a sponsor, a kind friend or supportive group to show us how to self-reparent ourselves.

  Alternatively, many survivors instinctively initiate reparenting by others, via entering what one of my clients describes as “the community of books”. They receive reparenting from authors who encourage them to value and support themselves.

  Alice was such a survivor. Her family traumatized her during childhood so thoroughly that she quickly learned that being vulnerable around others was dangerous, foolish and totally out of the question. Yet the urge to get the support and the help she was so unfairly deprived of worked its way back into her awareness via a strong attraction to self-help books. By reading a great deal of psychology, she eventually found enough help that she began to think that there might be a kind, safe and helpful person out there in the flesh and entered into some very helpful therapy. [Chapter 15, Bibliotherapy, contains my favorite recommendations for therapeutic self-help books].

  I too went through a long gradual process of reading and attending lectures before I was able to take the frightening and embarrassing plunge into therapy, where, as stated earlier, I was fortunate enough to find a good enough therapist to take my relational healing to the next level.

  Therapy allowed me to internalize and mimic my therapists’ consistent and reliable stance of being on my side. This in turn led me to gravitate toward safer and more truly intimate friendships. I have seen this same result with numerous clients and friends.

  Eventually, I achieved my first earned secure attachment outside of therapy and was subsequently ready to let go of therapy as the only place where I could have deep and meaningful connection.

  I believe the need to have mothering- and fathering-type support from others is a lifelong need and not just limited to childhood. Fortunately I am now blessed many years later to experience a multileveled form of reparenting by others which I call reparenting by committee. I conceptualize reparenting by committee as a circle of friends that has varying layers and levels of intimacy. The inner circle of my reparenting committee includes my five closest friends.

  I think of this inner circle as friends with whom nothing is too vulnerable or taboo to talk about. My wife, a therapist friend, my exercise buddy and two members of a long term men’s group that I was in are in this circle. This circle also has an outer layer of people who would be inner if circumstances allowed me to see them more.

  Outside this orb are levels of succeeding less intimate, yet still meaningful circles of relationship. The next circle out is intimates who I rarely see anymore but who have shared enough intimacy with me in the past that I now draw comfort from imagining them caring for me in the present. My deceased grandmother is in this circle as are three of my former therapists, a couple of army buddies, old high school and college friends, and my four best friends from the ten years I lived in Australia.

  The next circle out from this consists of my nurse practitioner, the body worker I occasionally see, some therapist colleagues and the wise old school librarian who helps me pick books for my son to read.

  The next circle out from this are friends I play sports with, parents of my son’s friends and people in my neighborhood with whom my contact is not especially vulnerable, but with whom there is an easy chemistry that adds to my general overall sense of belonging.

  And the final circle is occasional strangers, who from time to time, I am graced to have easy and comforting interactions with.

  I also know various survivors whose effective recovery practices have similarly rewarded them with enough portions of love from a variety of others that their childhood starvation for help and support is s
ignificantly assuaged. And like me, their committees, started with the first person they had good enough intimacy with. Counting yourself, this then is a committee of two, which with grace can then build slowly, one friendship at a time.

  The Tao Of Self-Relating And Relating To Others

  Recovering is therefore enhanced on every level by safe human help. Once again however, survivors with especially harsh betrayal histories may need to do a great deal of work on other levels before they are ready to risk the vulnerability of opening to relational help.

  Nonetheless, deep level recovering, as well as healthy “human-being” is typically a vacillating blend of self-help and help from others. Relational work helps heal the initial wound of family abandonment, and self work decreases the self-abandonment that occurs because the child was forced to imitate his parents’ abandonment of him. The more time you practice the various techniques of self-care described throughout this book, the less time you spend in self-abandonment. With enough persistence, self-care becomes an invaluable, irreplaceable habit.

  In advanced recovery, self-help and relational-help blend in an all important Tao. A Tao is a yin/yang combination of opposite and complementary forces. The Tao of relational recovery involves balancing healthy independence with healthy dependence on others.

  For the survivor, this therapeutic synthesis can come into being when an improved supportive relationship with yourself allows you to choose and open to a helpful relationship. Sometimes simultaneously, the attainment of a safe, supportive relationship with another person promotes the growth of your ability to be self-supportive. This then rewards you with a decrease in your automatic tendency toward self-abandonment. Complementarily, this then fosters the gradual development of community – the vital life resource that you were so unfairly deprived of in childhood.

  The more self-supportive we become the more we attract supportive others. The more we are supported by others, the more we can support ourselves. Sometimes we get initiated into this dynamic Tao by our own efforts - sometimes by the grace of finding a supportive friend or professional helper.

  For many of us survivors a considerable amount of self-help work has to take place before we are able to open to relational support – before we become discerning enough to choose truly safe and helpful support.

  THE PROGRESSION OF RECOVERING

  Signs Of Recovering

  Effective recovery work leads to an ongoing reduction of emotional flashbacks. Over time, with enough practice, you become more proficient at managing triggered states. This in turn results in flashbacks occurring less often, less intensely and less enduringly.

  Another key sign of recovering is that your critic begins to shrink and lose its dominance over your psyche. As it shrinks, your user-friendly ego has room to grow and to develop the kind of mindfulness that recognizes when the critic has taken over. This in turn allows you to progressively reject the critic’s perfectionistic and drasticizing processes. More and more, you stop persecuting yourself for normal foibles. Additionally, you perseverate less in disappointment about other people’s minor miscues.

  A further sign of recovering is a gradual increase in your ability to relax. With this comes an increasing ability to resist overreacting from a triggered position. This further allows you to use your fight, flight, freeze and fawn instincts in healthy and non-self-destructive ways. This means you only fight back when under real attack, only flee when odds are insurmountable, only freeze when you need to go into acute observation mode, and only fawn when it is appropriate to be self-sacrificing.

  An alternative way of describing this decrease in overreacting is that you have a good balance between the polar opposites of fight and fawn. As this becomes increasingly realized, you vacillate healthily between asserting your own needs and compromising with the needs of others.

  A further example of decreased reactivity is seen in a more balanced movement between the polar opposites of flight and freeze. This manifests as an improving equilibrium between doing and being, between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system arousal, and between left and right-brain processing. The importance of balancing the fight-fawn and flight-freeze polarities within yourself is explored in greater detail at the end of chapter 6.

  Deep-level recovery is also evidenced by you becoming gradually more relaxed in safe enough company. This in turn leads to an increasing capacity to be more authentic and vulnerable in trustworthy relationships. With enough grace, this may then culminate in you acquiring an intimate, mutually supportive relationship where each of you can be there for the other through thick and thin.

  Advanced recovery also correlates with letting go of the salvation fantasy that you will never have another flashback. Giving up the salvation fantasy is another one of those two steps forward, one step backward processes. We typically have to wrestle with denial a great deal to increasingly accept the unfair reality that we will never be totally flashback-free. Unless we do however, we impair our ability to easily recognize and quickly respond to flashbacks from a position of self-compassion, self-soothing and self-protection.

  The Stages Of Recovering

  Although we often work on many levels of recovering at the same time, recovering is to some degree progressive. It begins on the cognitive level when psychoeducation and mindfulness helps us understand that we have Cptsd. This awakening then allows us to learn how to approach the journey of deconstructing the various life-spoiling dynamics of Cptsd.

  Still on the cognitive level, we take our next steps into the long work of shrinking the critic. Some survivors will need to do a great deal of work on this level before they can move down to the emotional layer of work which is learning how to grieve effectively.

  The phase of intensely grieving our childhood losses can last for a couple of years. When sufficient progress is made in grieving, the survivor naturally drops down into the next level of recovery work. This involves working through fear by grieving our loss of safety in the world. At this level, we also learn to work through our toxic shame by grieving the loss of our self-esteem.

  As we become more adept in this type of deep level grieving, we are then ready to address the core issue of our trauma – the abandonment depression itself. Work here involves releasing the armoring and physiological reactivity in our body to the abandonment depression via the somatic work discussed in chapter 12. This work culminates with learning to compassionately support ourselves through our experiences of depression.

  Finally, as we will learn more about in chapter 13, many survivors need some relational help in achieving the complex tasks involved in deconstructing each layer of our old pain-exacerbating defenses.

  Cultivating Patience With The Gradual Progression Of Recovery

  As stated earlier, recovery from Cptsd is complex. Sometimes, it can feel so hopelessly complex that we totally give up and get stuck in inertia for considerable lengths of time. This is why it is so important to understand that recovery is gradual and frequently a backwards and forwards process.

  Effective recovery is often limited to only progressing in one or two areas at a time. Biting off more than we can chew and trying to accomplish too much too soon is often counterproductive. As a flight type, I spent years in mid-range recovery workaholically spinning my wheels trying to fix and change everything at once. I describe this at greater length in the “When Recovery becomes Obsessive-Compulsive” section of my first book [p140-141].

  We often need to simplify our self-help efforts in early recovery. Accordingly, I recommend making shrinking the critic [chapter 9] your “go to” response if you feel unsure of how to proceed.

  Once the critic is reduced enough that you can notice increasing periods of your brain being user-friendly, impulses to help and care for yourself naturally begin to arise. As this happens it becomes easier to tell whether you are guiding yourself with love or a whip. When you realize it’s the whip, please try to disarm your critic and treat yourself with the kindness you would extend t
o any young child who is struggling and having a hard time.

  Nowhere is patience with ourselves more important than with the inner critic work. Typically the inner critic is too omnipresent to confront on every occasion. To do so would often leave no time for anything else.

  But when we practice critic-shrinking in a gradually increasing way over time, we can more consistently disidentify from its negative focus and switch to a more self-supportive perspective. Eventually a new positive habit of rescuing ourselves from shame and self-hate takes on its own life. I still have my unfair share of flashbacks, but rarely do I ever side with my toxic critic.

  Any self-help practices that we are trying to make second nature often work in this way. When we practice enough, self-help starts to become a matter of common sense. It reverberates as right action and gradually takes on its own life as we attune to the true nature of our spirits and souls which are inherently self-supportive.

  We also aid our recovery greatly by challenging the all-or-none thinking of the critic whenever it judges us for not being perfect in our efforts. “Progress not perfection” is a powerful mantra for guiding our self-help recovery efforts.

  Moreover as recovering progresses, and especially as the critic shrinks, the desire to help yourself- to care for yourself - becomes more spontaneous. This is especially true when we mindfully do things for ourselves in a spirit of loving-kindness. As such, we can do it for the child we were – the child who was deprived through no fault of her own. And, we can do it because we believe every child, without exception, deserves loving care.

  Finally, if the reader is like I was in the past and has no overall perspective on his suffering, he may feel like he is spinning his wheels on one icy patch of road after another. I had decades of trying everything under the sun with what felt like a deepening sense of futility and defectiveness. Gratefully, I eventually reached an invisible critical mass, and realized I had actually come a long way. I had acquired quite a few pieces in this puzzle of recovery, and only needed to organize them into a map to move along further. As such, I have designed a ground plan that has helped me, my clients and website respondents to make sense of their suffering and to see how to effectively reduce it. I hope and pray that the cartography in this book will also offer you relief.