Complex PTSD

by Pete Walker

  Over time, I realized that my intention to be more forthcoming was frightening me into a flashback. This made me dissociate and forget everything I had planned to say. All I could think to do, when an amygdala hijacking took my left-brain off line, was to get my date talking. I then regressed to the tried and true safety position of listening and eliciting.

  It wasn’t until my therapist recommended that I write down some key words on my palm that I began to master the situation. Looking at the words brought my left-brain back online, and I gradually got better at holding up my end of the getting-to-know-you conversation.

  Much later, I had the realization: “No wonder I wind up with one narcissist after another. Narcissists love me because I am so enabling of their monologing. I probably met lots of nice balanced people who did not want another date with me because it seemed like I was hiding and hard to get to know.”

  Around this time I also had a fawn type friend who had the same problem. She liked to joke that her listening and eliciting defenses where so perfected that she could turn anyone, even a blank-screen therapist, into a monologing narcissist.

  To break free of their codependence, survivors must learn to stay present to the fear that triggers the self-abdication of the fawn response. In the face of their fear, they must try on and practice an expanding repertoire of more functional responses to fear. [See the flashback management steps in the next chapter]

  Facing The Fear Of Self-Disclosure

  Real motivation for surmounting this challenge usually comes from family of origin work. We need to intuit and puzzle together a detailed picture of the trauma that first frightened us out of our instincts of healthy self-expression.

  When we emotionally remember how overpowered we were as children, we can begin to realize that it was because we were too small and powerless to assert ourselves. But now in our adult bodies, we are in a much more powerful situation.

  And even though we might still momentarily feel small and helpless when we are triggered, we can learn to remind ourselves that we are now in an adult body. We have an adult status that now offers us many more resources to champion ourselves and to effectively protest unfairness in relationships.

  Grieving Through Codependence

  I usually find that deconstructing codependence involves a considerable amount of grieving. Typically this entails many tears about the loss and pain of being so long without healthy self-interest and self-protection. Grieving also unlocks healthy anger about a life lived with such a diminished sense of self.

  This anger can then be used to build a healthy fight response. Once again, the fight response is the basis of the instinct of self-protection, of balanced assertiveness, and of the courage that is needed to make relationships equal and reciprocal.

  Later Stage Recovery

  To facilitate the reclaiming of assertiveness, I encourage the survivor to imagine herself confronting a current or past unfairness. This type of role-playing is often delicate work, as it can invoke a therapeutic flashback that brings up old fear.

  As the survivor learns to stay present in assertiveness role-plays, she becomes more aware of how fear triggers her into fawning. She can then practice staying present to her fear and acting assertively anyway.

  With enough practice she then heals the developmental arrest of not having learned “to feel the fear and do it anyway.” This in turn sets the stage for deconstructing self-harmful reactions to fear like giving or compromising too much. Moreover, it makes the survivor more adept at flashback management.

  As later stage recovery progresses, the survivor increasingly “knows her own mind”. She slowly dissolves the habit of reflexively agreeing with other people’s preferences and opinions. She more easily expresses her own point of view and makes her own choices. And most importantly, she learns to stay inside herself.

  Many fawns survived by constantly focusing their awareness on their parents to figure out what was needed to appease them. Some became almost psychic in their ability to read their parents moods and expectations. This then helped them to figure out the best response to neutralize parental danger. For some, it even occasionally won them some approval.

  Survivors now need to deconstruct this habit by working to stay more inside their own experience without constantly projecting their attention outward to read others. Fawn-types who are still habituated to people-pleasing, must work on reducing their ingratiating behaviors. I have noticed over the years that the degree to which a survivor strains to please me reflects the degree to which his parents were dangerous.

  Recovering requires us to become increasingly mindful of our automatic matching and mirroring behaviors. This helps us decrease the habit of reflexively agreeing with everything that anyone says.

  It is a great accomplishment to significantly reduce verbal matching. It is an even more powerful achievement to reduce inauthentic emotional mirroring.

  Dysfunctional emotional matching is seen in behaviors such as acting amused at destructive sarcasm, acting loving when someone is punishing, and acting forgiving when someone is repetitively hurtful.

  I call this emotional individuation work. As such, recovery involves setting the kind of boundaries that help us to stay true to our own actual emotional experience.

  In advanced recovery, this occurs when we reduce the habit of automatically shifting our mood to match someone else’s emotional state. By this, I do not mean suppressing empathic attunement when it is genuine. Crying and laughing along with an intimate is a truly wonderful experience.

  Rather, what I am recommending here is resisting the pressure to pretend you are always feeling the same as someone else. You do not have to laugh when something is not funny. When a friend is feeling bad, you do not have to act like you feel bad. When you are feeling bad, you do not have to act like you feel happy.

  Thankfully, I learned a great deal about this from being a therapist. When my client is depressed, it does not help him if I adjust my mood and act depressed.

  Yet I am always genuinely empathic toward my client’s depression, because I can put myself in his shoes via my own experiences of depression. I can be there caringly for him without abandoning my own feeling of contentment in the moment.

  Similarly I can be feeling depressed while you are enthused about something and genuinely appreciate your happiness without shamefully abandoning my temporarily depressed self.

  Here is another example of this. You are in a great mood and tell me that you loved this old musical that you just saw. I, however, am feeling down and dislike old musicals. If I were a fight type, the table would be set for a great deal of mutual alienation.

  If I were an unrecovered fawn type, however, I might strangle my bad mood and my musical taste, and anxiously squeeze out a high-pitched, forced frivolity about how wonderful Fred Astaire is. Instead, I can reach for a deeper more authentic truth. I can let you know that I am pleased you had such a nice time. After all, I really believe in different strokes for different folks.

  As I write this, I flash on Bruno, a dear old hospice client of mine. During a visit, with him, he told me: “I can’t stand talking to that new volunteer. She acts so morose whenever she visits me. I mean, who the hell’s dying here… me or her? I tell ya I don’t know who is worse – her or that other smiley volunteer, the one who always acts like she just walked into Disneyland.”

  “Disapproval Is Okay With Me”

  Early in recovery, an esteemed mentor gave me the affirmation “Disapproval is okay with me.” Codependently, I enthusiastically welcomed his advice that I should practice it until it was true. Privately I thought “Surely you jest!” I had survived the previous thirty years with a Will Rogers-like mission to prove that “I never met a man I didn’t like.”

  I did not yet know that I had unconsciously gravitated to this all-or-none nonsense because I was somewhat desperately trying to seduce everyone I met into liking me in the hope that I could finally feel safe.

  As I thought further ab
out this affirmation, I judged it as patently absurd and eminently unachievable. Yet within a week something ignited in me that really wanted it to become true.

  Since it was still a long time before I knew anything about code-pendence, it took almost two decades to make any progress at all. The importance of learning to handle and accept disapproval faded in and out of my awareness myriad times.

  But now as I write thirty years later, I feel it is one of the most important things I have ever learned. I rest most of the time in receiving so much approval from my friends and intimates that I can usually let in their constructive feedback fairly easily. As a corollary to this, I rarely care what people think about me who I do not know or who do not know me.

  And, of course, this is not a perfect accomplishment. Disapproval can still on occasion trigger me into a flashback. But it delights me to report that I now experience most disapproval with considerable equanimity. I even occasionally experience some people’s disapproval as a good thing. Sometimes it is a validation that I am doing the right thing and evolving in the right direction. Nowhere is this truer than with the disapproval of the narcissistic parents or partners of clients whom I am working to rescue from their enslavement. Their disapproval of me is actually an affirmation that I have indeed been involved in right action.

  Most of the time, disapproval is okay with me.

  MANAGING EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS

  Emotional flashbacks are intensely disturbing regressions [“amygdala hijackings”] to the overwhelming feeling-states of your childhood abandonment. When you are stuck in a flashback, fear, shame and/or depression can dominate your experience.

  These are some common experiences of being in an emotional flashback. You feel little, fragile and helpless. Everything feels too hard. Life is too scary. Being seen feels excruciatingly vulnerable. Your battery seems to be dead. In the worst flashbacks an apocalypse feels like it will imminently be upon you.

  When you are trapped in a flashback, you are reliving the worst emotional times of you childhood. Everything feels overwhelming and confusing, especially because there are rarely any visual components to a Cptsd flashback. This is because, as Goleman’s work shows, amygdala hijackings are intense reactions in the emotional memory part of the brain that override the rational brain. These reactions occur in the brains of people who have been triggered into a 4F reaction so often, that minor events can now trigger them into a panicky state.

  This is a list of 13 practical steps for helping yourself to manage an emotional flashback:

  13 Steps for Managing Emotional Flashbacks

  [Focus on Bold Print when flashback is active]

  Say to yourself: “I am having a flashback”. Flashbacks take you into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as you were in childhood. The feelings and sensations you are experiencing are past memories that cannot hurt you now.

  Remind yourself: “I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present.” Remember you are now in the safety of the present, far from the danger of the past.

  Own your right/need to have boundaries. Remind yourself that you do not have to allow anyone to mistreat you; you are free to leave dangerous situations and protest unfair behavior.

  Speak reassuringly to the Inner Child. The child needs to know that you love her/him unconditionally– that s/he can come to you for comfort and protection when s/he feels lost and scared.

  Deconstruct eternity thinking. In childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless – a safer future was unimaginable. Remember this flashback will pass as it always has before.

  Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. [Feeling small and fragile is a sign of a flashback.]

  Ease back into your body. Fear launches you into “heady” worrying, or numbing and spacing out. [a]Gently ask your body to Relax: feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. [Tightened muscles send false danger signals to your brain.]

  [b]Breathe deeply and slowly. [Holding your breath also signals danger.]

  [c]Slow down: rushing presses your brain’s flight response button.

  [d]Find a safe place to unwind and soothe yourself: wrap yourself in a blanket, hold a pillow or a stuffed animal, lie down on your bed or in a closet or in a bath; take a nap.

  [e]Feel the fear in your body without reacting to it. Fear is just an energy in your body. It cannot hurt you if you do not run from it.

  Resist the Inner Critic’s Drasticizing and Catastrophizing. [a]Use Thought-stopping to halt the critic’s endless exaggerations of danger, and its constant planning to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self- attack into saying “NO” to your critic’s unfair self-criticism.

  [b]Use Thought-substitution & Thought-correction to replace negative thinking with a memorized list of your qualities and accomplishments.

  Allow yourself to grieve. Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment. Validate and soothe your child’s past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn your tears into self-compassion and your anger into self-protection.

  Cultivate safe relationships and seek support. Take time alone when you need it, but don’t let shame isolate you. Feeling shame doesn’t mean you are shameful. Educate your intimates about flashbacks and ask them to help you talk and feel your way through them.

  Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks. Avoid unsafe people, places, activities and triggering mental processes. Practice preventive maintenance with these steps when triggering situations are unavoidable.

  Figure out what you are flashing back to. Flashbacks are opportunities to discover, validate and heal your wounds from past abuse and abandonment. They also point to your still unmet developmental needs and can provide you with motivation to get them met.

  Be patient with a slow recovery process. It takes time in the present to become de-adrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradually progressive process [often two steps forward, one step back], not an attained salvation fantasy. Don’t beat yourself up for having a flashback.

  My clients, who post this somewhere conspicuous until they memorize the gist of it, typically progress more rapidly in their recovery. You can easily print out a copy from the “13 Steps” page of my website: www.pete-walker.com.

  Triggers And Emotional Flashbacks

  A trigger is an external or internal stimulus that activates us into an emotional flashback. This often occurs on a subliminal level outside the boundaries of normal consciousness. Recognizing what triggers us can therefore be difficult. Nonetheless, becoming increasingly mindful of our triggers is crucial because it sometimes allows us to avoid flashback-inducing people, situations and behaviors.

  External triggers are people, places, things, events, facial expressions, styles of communication, etc., that remind us of our original trauma in a way that flashes us back into the painful feelings of those times. Here are some examples of powerful and common triggers: revisiting your parents; seeing someone who resembles a childhood abuser; experiencing the anniversary of an especially traumatic event; hearing someone use a parent’s shaming tone of voice or turn of phrase.

  Many triggers however are not so explicit. Sometimes all unknown adults can trigger us into fear even when there is no resemblance to our original abuser[s]. I still occasionally feel triggered when I come across a group of teenagers, because I grew up in a neighborhood where there were many violent ones. For this reason, my son who is quite empathic joked that he will not become a teenager when he grows up.

  Sometimes someone looking at us, or even noticing us, can trigger us into fear and toxic shame. One of my clients once came in intensely triggered because a cat was staring at him
. Other common triggers include making a mistake, asking for help, or having to speak in front of a group of people. Moreover, simply feeling tired, sick, lonely or hungry can sometimes trigger a flashback. Any type of physical pain can also be a trigger.

  For many survivors, authority figures are the ultimate triggers. I have known several survivors, who have never gotten so much as a parking ticket, who cringe in anxiety whenever they come across a policeman or a police car.

  It took me decades to overcome my intense performance anxiety about teaching. Nothing could trigger me more than an upcoming teaching engagement. Fortunately I was unwilling to give up this activity, because I enjoyed it most of the time once I got going. I did not make any real progress, beyond learning to “white-knuckle it,” until I recognized my performance anxiety as a flashback to the danger of talking at family dinner time. This recognition allowed me to see that I was unconsciously terrified that my parents were going to show up and scoff at me in public.

  At first, I [my critic] labeled this a preposterous idea, but when I started to imagine and practice aggressively defending myself against them on the drive to my teaching engagement, I soon experienced an enormous reduction in my anxiety. This experience lead to me formulating Step 6 in the flashback management steps above, as well as my ideas about angering against the critic, which will be explored in the next chapter.

  The Look: A Common Trigger Of Emotional Flashbacks

  Early on in working with this model, I was surprised that certain clients with relatively moderate childhood abuse were plagued by emotional flashbacks. Most of them in fact were quite sure that they had never even been hit. Many of them however would talk about how they hated it when their parents gave them the look.