Complex PTSD

by Pete Walker

  Refusing To Give Voice To The Critic’s Point Of View

  The outer critic is the author of this intimacy-spoiling program: Being honest to a fault. In the guise of honesty, the outer critic can negatively notice only what is imperfect in another. Under the spell of perfectionism, the outer critic can tear the other apart by laundry-listing his normal weaknesses and foibles. When challenged about this many fight types will respond that: “I was just trying to be honest!”

  The inner critic has its own version of excessive honesty which I sometimes call “beating you to the punch.” Afraid of being criticized [as in childhood], the inner critic can launch the survivor into a “confession” of her every defect in hopes of short-circuiting anyone else from bringing them up. Sometimes hearing the criticism from yourself feels less hurtful than hearing it from someone else. After all, it’s old news to you and your critic.

  I subscribe to authenticity as one of my highest values, but it does not include sharing my outer critic’s view of you or exposing my inner critic’s unfair judgments of me.

  As stated earlier, the toxic critic is not an authentic part of us. We were not born with it. We were indoctrinated with it by parents who viewed us in an extremely negative and jaundiced way. Because of this, we need to protect our intimates from its distorted and destructive judgments. Just as importantly, we need to protect ourselves from alienating people by presenting ourselves as if we are so defective that we do not deserve to be loved.

  OUTER CRITIC-DOMINATED FLASHBACKS

  Holly, an elderly client and a flight-fight type, was suffering minor, age-related memory loss. She started her session chuckling: “I was reading your article on the Outer Critic again last night. I didn’t really get it when I read it three years ago, but I get it now and I think it’s because my memory deterioration has a silver lining.

  “So, you know how I’m always blaming my husband whenever anything goes wrong at home. Well I’m starting to get that it’s an all-or-none, outer critic process that I get stuck in.

  “I’ve been blaming him for misplacing or not putting things away for decades but I’ve started to notice that it’s me who often misplaces things. I was cooking a meal last night and looking for the food scissors that I use to cut up leafy vegetables. It wasn’t on the magnetic wall strip where I insist that we keep it, and I immediately started feeling very angry at him - and more and more angry as I searched in various drawers to no avail.

  “The longer I searched, the more exasperated I got, and sure enough, I found myself laundry-listing all his faults. My resentment rapidly escalated and peaked with me deciding that I really was going to leave him this time. As I continued to amass evidence that he was a terrible loser and that this was a wise decision, I went back to the stove and found the scissors where I’d left them five minutes ago. I could see the scraps of spinach still on them from when I’d cut it up over the pot!

  “What a mortifying epiphany I had! - Especially since a similar thing had happened with the tooth paste the night before. I forgot I had put it in the medicine cabinet in one of my organizational upgrades, and I was convinced Frank had moved it from its proper place. I started reading him the riot act so intensely, that he pretended he had to get something out of the car. And then, when I went to the medicine cabinet for some aspirin, there it was where I had placed it myself!

  “Oh my god, that outer critic did an instant about face into becoming the inner critic. And then when it had contemptuously lambasted me to tears, I suddenly had another epiphany about how I would let any mistake on his part launch me into a two volume history of his past mistakes. I’d get so stuck in that negative noticing that I couldn’t call to mind a single good thing about this good enough husband that I’ve had for thirty-five years.”

  Holly and I spent a great deal of time fleshing this out. She could see that the outer critic typically triggered her into a very old feeling and belief that “People are so unreliable – they always let you down –they just can’t be trusted!”

  We then moved into exploring her childhood, looking for clues as to where this belief that people were so untrustworthy began. She closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths, and when she opened them tears trickled down her face. “It was Father – Daddy - that incredibly selfish, alcoholic a-hole. Please pardon my French. No matter where I’d hide my baby-sitting money he’d always find it, and come home drunk later, crying about how sorry he was and how he’d never do it again. He’d even let me go off on him! Oh my God, just like poor Frank! Just sit there and take it. Only poor Frank [more tears], he’s never done anything like that to me. He’s pretty reliable in most ways, except for not being as organized as me.”

  OUTER CRITIC MODELLING IN THE MEDIA

  Outer critic entrenchment is also difficult to dislodge because its parlance is normalized, and worse, celebrated in our society. Skewering people seems to be standard practice in most TV comedies. Moreover, many influential, seemingly healthy adults model a communication style that is rife with judgmentalness, sarcasm, negativity, fear-mongering and scapegoating.

  Giving control of our social interactions to the outer critic prohibits the cultivation of the vulnerable communication that makes intimacy possible. We must renounce unconscious outer critic strategies such as: [1] “I will use angry criticism to make you afraid of me, so I can be safe from you”; [2] “Why should I bother with people when everyone is so selfish and corrupt” [all-or-none thinking]; [3] “I will perfectionistically micromanage you to prevent you from betraying or abandoning me”; [4] “I will rant and rave or leave at the first sign of a lonely feeling, because ‘if you really loved me, I would never feel lonely’”.

  The Critic: Subliminal B-Grade Movie Producer

  The outer critic typically arises most powerfully during emotional flashbacks. At such times, it transmutes unconscious abandonment pain into an overwhelmingly negative perception of people and of life in general. It obsessively fantasizes, consciously and unconsciously, about how people have or could hurt us.

  Over the years these fantasies typically expand from scary snapshots into film clips and even movies. Without realizing it, we can amass a video collection of real and imagined betrayals that destroy our capacity to be nurtured by human contact.

  “Don’t trust anyone”, “Proud to be a loner”, “You can only depend on yourself”, “Lovers always leave you”, “Kids will break your heart”, “Only fools let on what they really think”, “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile”, are titles of video themes survivors may develop in their quest for interpersonal safety.

  These defensive and often subliminal daydreams are analogs of the critic-spawned nightmares that also shore up the “safety” work of frightening us into isolation. Over time, with enough recovery, intrusive anti-intimacy reveries become clues that we are actually in a flashback, and that we need to invoke our flashback management skills.

  The dynamics of the outer critic are often obscured by minimization and denial. Its obsessions and “daymares” often occur just below the level of our awareness. They become subliminal via their repetitiveness like the sound of waves at the beach - like the sounds of traffic in the city - like the sound of the critic repetitively calling you or someone else a jerk, a loser, a dumbsh*t!

  Watching The News As A Trigger

  Sometimes the outer critic’s penchant for raising false alarms ensnares us with an insatiable hunger for listening to the news. When we do not resist this junk food feeding of our psyches with a news “service” that exults so thoroughly in the negative, we can be left floundering in a dreadful hypervigilance.

  The critic can then work overtime to amass irrefutable proof that the world is unforgivably dangerous. Isolation, and minimal or superficial relating, is therefore, our only recourse. At such times any inclination to call a friend triggers images of rejection and humiliation before the phone can even be picked up. When flashbacks are particularly intense, impulses to venture out may immediately trigger fant
asies of being verbally harassed or even mugged on the street.

  In worse case scenarios, outer critic drasticizing deteriorates into paranoia. At its worst paranoia deteriorates into fantasies and delusions of persecution. I remember one horribly, humiliating experience that occurred in my early twenties on an occasion when I was very sleep-deprived. I was sitting on a park bench struggling to concentrate on the book I was reading. I had read the same short paragraph four times and barely registered a word of it. At the same time, I was becoming more and more aware of a group of people who had sat down behind me. I started feeling ashamed because they were having a great time while I sat there painfully self-conscious and despondent.

  Suddenly I realized they were talking disparagingly about me. I was too scared to turn around. Their comments became steadily more insulting. Their loud laughter became increasingly mocking. In my mind’s I eye I could see them all staring and pointing at me: “Look at that sorry-ass loser. He’s pretending he’s not even listening!” Finally, in desperation, I turned around and croaked out a weak “What’s going on?”

  I was shocked and even more mortified at the same time. They were not even looking at me. They were so immersed in their joyful banter that they did not even notice that I turned around and spoke. It became immediately obvious to me that it was a terrible figment of my imagination. I slunk away in shame and had to wait decades to understand how my Cptsd and the outer critic had manufactured this terrible paranoia.

  INTIMACY AND THE OUTER CRITIC

  As stated earlier, Cptsd typically includes an attachment disorder that comes from the absence of a sympathetic caregiver in childhood. When the developing child lacks a supportive parental refuge, she never learns that other people can soothe loneliness and emotional pain. She never learns that real intimacy grows out of sharing all of her experience.

  To the degree that our caretakers attack or abandon us for showing vulnerability, to that degree do we later avoid the authentic self-expression that is fundamental to intimacy. The outer critic forms to remind us that everyone else is surely as dangerous as our original caretakers. Subliminal memories of being scorned for seeking our parents’ support then short-circuit our inclinations to share our troubles and ask for help.

  Even worse, retaliation fantasies can plague us for hours and days on the occasions when we do show our vulnerabilities. I once experienced this after being very honest and vulnerable in a job interview with a committee of eight. Over the next three insomnia-plagued nights, my outer critic ran non-stop films featuring my interviewers’ contempt about everything I had said, and disgust about all that I had left out. Even after they subsequently and enthusiastically hired me, the outer critic plagued me with “imposter syndrome” fantasies of eventually being exposed as incompetent in the new job.

  The No-Win Situation

  While scaring us out of trusting others, the outer critic also pushes us to over-control them to make them safer. Over-controlling behaviors include shaming, excessive criticism, monologing [conversational control] and overall bossiness. An extreme example of the latter is the no-win situation, which is also known as the double bind. It is described in the vernacular as “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”[Only the most severe fight types do this consciously. These types are found on the end of the narcissistic continuum where narcissism turns into sociopathy.]

  Sterling was a fight type client of mine who was strongly narcissistic, but not sociopathic. He wanted me to prove that I was meticulously attending to his pause-less monologue by giving him an empathic “un hunh” at about the rate of once a paragraph. He would usually cue me to do this by ending a sentence with “You Know?”

  Over time, I could usually tell when he was in a flashback because he would be bothered by the frequency or quality of my “un hunh.” He was alternately frustrated if I used too many or too few “un hunhs”. In the first instance he fumed: “Haven’t you ever heard of a rhetorical question?” In the alternate instance, his frustration flared out at my lack of sympathy because I was not responding with “un hunh” enough.

  There is an inner critic version of the no-win situation. Howard came into a session with a 102 temperature and a raging case of the flu. He told me: “I was lying in bed fluctuating between the sweats and the chills, and the critic was kicking my ass. ‘You lazy, flakey piece of sh*t! Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get off your sorry ass and get to your appointment!’”

  Howard then told me that he fought this for about fifteen minutes, but the critic finally won and he came. As he sat in my waiting room, the critic started in again: “You are such an idiot. How could you be so stupid to go out feeling like this? You masochistic loser, you’re just trying to kill yourself. Why do you even bother trying to get better?”

  Scaring Others Away

  To avoid the vulnerability of being close, the outer critic can also broadcast from the various inner critic endangerment program. Catastrophizing out loud can be very triggering to others and can be an unconscious way of making them afraid of us.

  One of my basketball-playing acquaintances is addicted to listening to a local, doom-and-gloom news station. He has managed to alienate everyone in our gym by his non-stop proselytizing about the catastrophic demise of our times. One of the players joked that he will not pass him the ball anymore because he thinks the guy believes that it is impossible for it to go through the hoop.

  Survivors who unnecessarily frighten others by excessively broadcasting about all the possible things that could go wrong rarely endear themselves to others. Moreover, they “force” others to avoid and abandon them when their negative noticing reaches a critical mass and becomes noise pollution.

  VACILLATING BETWEEN OUTER AND INNER CRITIC

  Many Cptsd survivors flounder in caustic judgmentalness, shuffling back and forth between pathologizing others [the toxic blame of the outer critic] and pathologizing themselves [the toxic shame of the inner critic]. They get stuck in endless loops of detailing the relational inadequacies of others, and then of themselves.

  My parents’ twisted version of this boiled down to: “As f*cked up as we are, we’re still way better than you”. Karen Horney described this trauma two-step as all-or-none lurching between the polarities of the grandiose self and the despised self.

  When we become lost in this process, we miss out on our crucial emotional need to experience a sense of belonging. We live in permanent estrangement oscillating between the extremes of too good for others or too unlikeable to be included. This is the excruciating social perfectionism of the Janus-faced critic: others are too flawed to love and we are too defective to be lovable.

  A verbal diagram of a typical critic-looping scenario looks like this. The outer critic’s judgmentalness is activated by the need to escape the “in-danger” feeling that is triggered by socializing. Even the thought of relating can set off our disapproval programs so that we feel justified in isolating. Extended withdrawal however, reawakens our relational hunger and our impulses to connect. This simultaneously reverses the critic from outer to inner mode. The critic then laundry lists our inadequacies, convincing us that we are too odious to others to socialize. This then generates self-pitying persecution fantasies, which eventually re-invites the outer critic to build a case about how awful people are…ad infinitum…ad nauseam. This looping then keeps us “safe” in the hiding of silent disengagement.

  When it emanates from the inner critic direction, the vacillating critic can look like this. The survivor’s negative self-noticing drives her to strive to be perfect. She works so hard and incessantly at it that she begins to resent others who do not. Once the resentment accumulates enough, a minor faux pas in another triggers her to shift into extreme outer critic disappointment and frustration. She then silently perseverates and laundry lists “people” for all their faults and betrayals. How long she remains polarized to the outer critic usually depends on her 4F type, but sooner or later she starts to feel guilty about this, and suddenly t
he inner critic is back on line judging her harshly for being so judgmental. The cataloguing of her own defects then resumes in earnest.

  A Case Example Of The Vacillating Critic

  My wife and I have been living together for more than a decade. We have come a long way in negotiating what seems to both of us - most of the time – a fair and flexible approach to handling the innumerable tasks involved in running a household with a young child. But sometimes, when I am experiencing an extended flashback, I start over-noticing imperfections in the general household order.

  Where the critic first points the finger varies. If I am triggered into tired survival mode, the inner critic can launch into berating me for my sub-standard contribution. If on the other hand I am triggered into flight mode and have been speed-cleaning, my outer critic can start keeping score. In this latter mode, my outer critic can perseverate about how little my wife is doing compared to me. The comparisons are typically in the areas where I have recently been over-contributing.

  But my fawn side is pretty strong and before too long, I can start noticing all the venues where I do not contribute as much as she. And suddenly I am the selfish slacker of the family. As the flashback continues, I may then flip into berating myself for being picky and ungenerous.

  In an especially strong flash back, the outer critic will come back sooner or later and start assigning more weight and importance to my contributions, and then belittle her for being, slack, thoughtless, self-involved, etc.