Complex PTSD

by Pete Walker

  12. Time Urgency. I am not in danger. I do not need to rush. I will not hurry unless it is a true emergency. I am learning to enjoy doing my daily activities at a relaxed pace.

  13. Disabling Performance Anxiety. I reduce procrastination by reminding myself that I will not accept unfair criticism or perfectionist expectations from anyone. Even when afraid, I will defend myself from unfair criticism. I won’t let fear make my decisions.

  14. Perseverating About Being Attacked. Unless there are clear signs of danger, I will thought-stop my projection of past bullies/critics onto others. The vast majority of my fellow human beings are peaceful people. I have legal authorities to aid in my protection if threatened by the few who aren’t. I invoke thoughts and images of my friends’ love and support.

  Critic attacks like most things are not all-or-none. They can vary in intensity and duration. Most of the case examples that follow are on the intense end of the spectrum. I chose them because they are more illustrative of how the critic operates. Once you become proficient at identifying intense critic attacks, you typically develop the mindfulness necessary to notice more subtle attacks. This is essential because most survivors spend tremendous amounts of time barely conscious of how incessantly self-critical they are.

  As with the flashback management steps, memorizing these rebuttals to the critic and using them like mantras is especially helpful in critic shrinking.

  Critic-initiated Flashbacks

  The inner critic commonly increases the intensity of a flashback via a barrage of the attacks listed above. Flashbacks can devolve into increasingly painful levels of the abandonment depression. One attack can repetitively bleed into another and tumble us further down a spiral of hopelessness. It is awful enough to take a single punch in a fight, but when the punches keep coming, the victim is severely thrashed.

  Once again, Cptsd flashbacks do not typically have a visual component. However, it is not unusual for a survivor to sometimes flash on a snapshot of a parent’s contemptuous face at the moment of triggering.

  My client, Dmitri, began his session by telling me that he was contentedly puttering around his kitchen when he accidentally knocked over a glass of water. He immediately pictured his father and a loud internal voice blurted: “I’m such a world class spaz!”

  Retrospectively, he realized that he then plummeted instantly into a flashback. Anxiety quickly overwhelmed him and he was soon lost in a tirade of self-attacking diatribes emanating from the critic. “Spaz” is an example of the name-calling that the critic specializes in. It is a combination of critic attacks # 1, 3 and 9 above.

  The attacks soon deteriorated into a full scale laundry listing of all his imperfections. These were characteristically blown out of proportion, and often not reality based. The critic screamed: “I’m so clumsy. I never do anything right [#2 all-or-none thinking]. “I could f*ck up a free lunch!”

  Quickly, Dmitri’s thinking was totally dominated by a negative focus[#11] that merged with drasticizing [#10], and culminated in attack fantasies [#14] that made him cancel his plans to go out.

  This example is only a micro-portion of the unending onslaught that can accompany a major flashback. After enduring many, many more elaborations of this process, Dmitri became entrenched in the ultimate abandonment catastrophization [#10]: “No wonder I don’t have a partner or any friends; who could tolerate being around such a loser” [#2: He actually had two good friends].

  Dmitri’s felt-sense of abandonment then morphed into self-abandonment. Primitive self-soothing behaviors reemerged as he self-medicated by binging on an enormous amount of junk food. He then retreated into his bedroom to dissociate further into a long morning nap.

  All this in reaction to the tiny faux pas of a spilled glass of water!

  I must emphasize here that Dmitri was not crazy or defective because his critic made a hell out of a spilled glass of water. All this was a re-visit via flashback to the real traumatic experiences of being profoundly rejected by his parents for trivial mistakes. His father had contemptuously told him he could f*ck up a free lunch innumerable times.

  As Dmitri resolved and harvested the learning potential of this flashback, he said to me: “Pete, I can’t tell you how horrible they were. Life at home was one no-win, mind-f*ck situation after another. F*cked if I did, and f*cked if I didn’t. It’s no wonder I’ve been stuck all these years with this ball and chain code: ‘Don’t ever let down your guard!’ Something’s just moved in me and I swear I’m gonna start cutting myself some slack!”

  Thoughts As Triggers

  Rejecting parents typically make the child believe that his opinions and feelings are dangerous imperfections. In worst case scenarios the mere impulse to speak triggers fear and shame. How could anything the child says not reveal his stupidity and worthlessness? Opening his mouth invariably leads to deeper rejection and trouble.

  As ongoing neglect and abuse repetitively strengthen the critic, even the most innocuous, self-interested thought or musing can trigger a five alarm fire of intense emotional flashback. To maintain the illusive hope of someday winning parental approval, the child’s perfectionistic striving escalates, and may become obsessive/compulsive. Even an imagined mistake can then initiate a flashback.

  The Critic As The Shaming Internalized Parents

  Not infrequently, a client comes into a session and shamefully confesses something that sounds like this: “I called myself a f*ckwit over and over last night. I must really be inherently messed up, because I know my mother never said that. As bad as she was, she never swore and I doubt she ever even heard that word.”

  The explanation for this is that the critic is essentially a process. It is an ever developing process that co-opts our creativity and funnels it into “new and improved” ways of imitating our parents’ disparagement.

  Parental contempt is the key piece of the emotional abuse that creates toxic shame. Toxic shame is the emotional matrix of the abandonment depression. It is also the glue that keeps us stuck helplessly in flashbacks. As such, toxic shame is the affect or emotional tone of the inner critic. Shame besmirches us as it emotionally intensifies each of the 14 assaults described above.

  In main stream psychology, shame is often described as a social emotion. Normal shame is a somewhat healthy, self-regulating emotional reaction that arises when someone witnesses us acting in an unfair, offensive, or hurtful way.

  This is not the case with toxic shame however. Many Cptsd survivors in recovery soon realize that they do not need a witness to suddenly be catapulted into a shame attack.

  Dmitri was all alone when he knocked over the glass.

  Or was he? There is an invisible social context to toxic shame attacks. Toxic shame is social because the inner critic came into existence through pathological interactions with our parents. Moreover, toxic shame is social in the moment of the solitary flashback, because at the time it is as if we are in the presence of our parents.

  For me, the strongest evidence of this occurs when I am on my own and trying to do something difficult. If I make a mistake or do not accomplish my task as efficiently as possible, I often feel very anxious as if I am being watched and criticized.

  I believe this phenomenon corresponds with an internalization of our parents. Our parents were such formative and formidable presences in our developing life, that we have strong representations of them in our psyches. These representations include their beliefs and condemnation about us. Until we work on shrinking their influence, our internalized parents exist in our psyches as the key controlling force of our lives.

  Facing The Stubbornness Of The Critic

  The work of shrinking the critic is one of the most essential processes of recovery. As obvious as its value may seem as you read this, embracing the task of renouncing the critic is much more challenging than it may seem at first blush.

  The critic’s programs are not only burned deeply into our psyches by our parents, but we also unknowingly emblazon them into our minds by
mimicking our parents. We are now the key reinforcing agents of their toxic legacy. With little mindfulness of it, we injure ourselves with countless angry, self-disgusted repetitions of their judgments. Recovery now depends on you withdrawing your blind allegiance to this terrible process of only noticing yourself negatively.

  The task of diminishing these self-negating patterns is daunting. It is typically lifetime work – often negotiable only at the rate of two-steps-forward, one-step backward. And oh how unfair it is that the step backward often feels more like six!

  Yet recent findings in neuroscience [The General Theory of Love; The Talking Cure] have shown that biologically ingrained mental patterns can be diminished and replaced with new ones through long term repetitive work. I believe this is analogous to adding or subtracting girth to parts of your physique, which typically takes seemingly innumerable repetitions of a given exercise.

  In the last couple of decades my brain has gone from being my own worst enemy almost all the time to being very reliably on my side. I have also seen similar gains with many of the clients I have worked with long-term.

  Perfectionism And Emotional Neglect

  As stated earlier, perfectionism also seems to be an instinctual defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential impossibility of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until lack of success forces her to retreat into a dissociative freeze response or an anti-social fight response.

  Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. Striving to be perfect offers her a semblance of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence.

  As the quest for perfection fails over and over, and as parental acceptance and nurturing remain elusive, imperfection becomes synonymous with shame and fear. Perceived imperfection triggers fear of abandonment, which triggers self-hate for imperfection, which expands abandonment into self-abandonment. This in turn amps fear up even further, which in turn intensifies self-disgust, etc. On and on it goes in a downward spiral of fear and shame-encrusted depression. It can go on for hours, days, weeks, and for those with severe Cptsd, can become their standard mode of being.

  More On Endangerment

  The importance and magnitude of the critic’s endangerment programs cannot be overstated. I have worked with numerous “well-therapized” people who were relatively free from perfectionism, but still seriously afflicted with the critic’s addiction to noticing potential danger. Said another way, I have seen survivors eliminate much of their perfectionist, self-attacking thinking without realizing that the critic was still flooding their minds with fear-inducing thoughts and images.

  I learned to disidentify from perfectionism long before I learned to stop perseverating on my critic’s harrowing snapshots of danger. In fact, I became quite adept at morphing these snapshots into feature long films about my imminent demise.

  Permanent abandonment, public humiliation, lethal illness, lonely death, imminent attack, and penniless homelessness are common endangerment themes of many survivors. One of my clients identified his inner critic endangerment process as: “My critic, the horror movie producer”. This made me think: “My critic the terrorist”.

  If I had to describe the two most key processes of the critic, I would say this. First, the critic is above all a self-perpetuating process of extreme negative noticing. Second the critic is a constant hypervigilance that sees disaster hovering in the next moment about to launch into a full-court-press.

  Using Anger To Thought-Stop The Critic

  Thought-stopping is the process of using willpower to disidentify from and interrupt toxic thoughts and visualizations. Sometimes visualizing a stop sign at the same time can help strengthen thought-stopping.

  Since traumatizing parents cripple the instinctive fight response of their child, recovering the anger of the fight response is essential in healing Cptsd. We need the aid of our fight response to empower the process of thought-stopping the critic.

  I cannot over-encourage you to use your anger to stop the critic in its tracks. We can re-hijack the anger of the critic’s attack, and forcefully redirect it at the critic instead of ourselves. We can then silently and internally say “No!” or “Stop!” or “Shut Up!” to short-circuit drasticizing and perfectionistic mental processes.

  Angrily saying “No!” to the critic sets an internal boundary against unnatural, anti-self processes. It is the hammer of self-renovating carpentry that rebuilds our instinct of self-protection. Furthermore recovery is deepened by directing our anger at anyone who helped install the critic, as well as at anyone who is currently contributing to keeping it alive.

  I recently received this e-mail from a website respondent who read some of my writing about angering at the critic: “Another explanation I really liked is for people that don’t have much of the FIGHT response to start using it to stop the inner critic. I am a huge fan of self-compassion which has really helped me recently (loving-kindness) and I continually just accept all the messages and just let them flow by. When I heard your comments about saying NO and rejecting them, I was like ‘Yeah- I guess Pete maybe hasn’t found it all yet.’ I was being close minded. A couple days later I tried it out and Oh My Gog has it helped. I get mad now and it just shuts down my anxiety and turns shame into blame/anger. It feels much better for me! After all it wasn’t messages I would have given to myself, and they are all messages from my parents.”

  Successful critic-shrinking usually requires thousands of angry skirmishes with the critic. Passionate motivation for this work often arises when we construct an accurate picture of our upbringing. Natural anger eventually arises when we really get how little and defenseless we were when our parents bullied us into hating ourselves.

  Most trauma survivors were blank slates who were brainwashed into accepting the critic as their primary identity. To the degree that a family is Cptsd-engendering, to that degree is it like a mini-cult. Cults demand absolute loyalty to the leader’s authority and belief system. In early thought-stopping work, most survivors need to empower their efforts with a healthy rage against their parents for destroying their self-loyalty and their self-individuation. However, with enough practice, the survivor’s healthy observing ego can use willpower alone to disidentify from the critic.

  My son’s birth graced me with an enormous boost in my motivation to practice thought-stopping on the critic. Witnessing the many miracles of his ongoing development moved me to increasingly deepen my emotional bonding with him. This was quite disconcerting to my critic which began working overtime on its endangerment programs.

  The critic warned me interminably about the danger of my rapidly expanding attachment to him. It was trying to protect me from the devastation that would ensue if my loving emotional investment turned out as badly as it did with my parents. What if untrustworthy “Life” let him die or rendered him a “bad seed.”

  The critic manufactured the most dreadful horror movies of accidents, diseases, kidnapping, mental illness, oedipal betrayals, etc. Had I not known how to recognize, interpret and refuse to indulge these catastrophizations, I am sure that my capacity to bond with him would have been seriously compromised. Moreover, had I not been able to use my outrage to disidentify from the critic, thought-stopping by itself would not have been a powerful enough tool.

  I particularly like this way of challenging the critic. “I’m not afraid of you anymore, mom and dad. You were the critic, and you put the critic in me. I renounce your toxic messages. Take back your shame and disgust. I am disgusted at your shameful job of parenting.”

  One of my clients shared with me a phrase that spontaneously came to her while she was fighting her critic at home. “You totally ruined my childhood, and I’m not going to let you get away with ruining my life now.” She reported that this perspective emblazoned in her consciousness, and now often helps to fire her
up to fire the critic.

  Shame Is Blame Unfairly Turned Against The Self

  The great psychologist, Erik Eriksen, gave us a great tool when he formulated this emotional mathematics equation. “Shame is blame turned against the self”. Our parents were too big and powerful to blame, so we had to blame ourselves instead. Now, however we are free of them, and we can cut off the critic’s shame supply by redirecting unfair self-blame back to our parents.

  You can redirect the anger of the critic’s blaming messages away from you. You can direct the anger onto the installers of the critic, or sideways onto the critic itself. You can give shame back by allowing yourself to feel angry and disgusted at the image of your parent bullying you. You can rage at them for overwhelming you with shame when you were too young and small to defend yourself.

  An inner critic that has dominated us since childhood, however, does not give up its rulership of the psyche easily. It stubbornly refuses to accept the updated information that adulthood now offers the possibility of increasing safety and healthy attachment. It is as if the critic has worn a flashback-inducing groove in the brain the size of the Grand Canyon. Now, any of the thinking patterns listed earlier can hair-trigger an amygdala-hijacking that dumps us into the abandonment mélange.

  Progress in critic-shrinking is often infinitesimally slow and indiscernible at first. Our brains have become addicted to only noticing what is wrong and what is dangerous. And as with most addictions, breaking this deeply entrenched habit may require lifelong management.

  In early recovery work, we need to challenge the critic’s monocular negative focus over and over with all the ferocity we can muster. Eventually with practice we can find a part of ourselves that is mad about how grossly unfair our parents’ bullying and indifference was. We can find a part of us that is outraged that we were indoctrinated and inculcated into chronically abandoning and bullying ourselves. We can fume that this occurred when we were too young to protest or even know what was happening to us. We can gradually build our ability to say “No!” and “Shut up!” whenever we catch the critic attacking us.