Complex PTSD

by Pete Walker

  In our early relationship I could loop this loop for quite some time, losing hours even days to feeling disaffected from my wife, and from myself. My peace of mind would deteriorate into an inner battleground of feeling abandoned by her while simultaneously judging myself for abandoning her. In the worst flashbacks, the process did not stay internal, and we would have conflicts about this issue.

  These days conflict rarely occurs over chores. Because of what I have learned about the outer critic, internal looping about this has also decreased immeasurably. Mindfulness about my outer and inner critic processes allows me to identify them sooner and rescue myself and my relationship from them much more quickly.

  The scenario above is also a typical example of what worrying looks like in a flashback.

  THE CRITIC AS JUDGE, JURY AND EXECUTIONER

  As noted above, not all survivors hide their outer critic. Fight types and subtypes can take the passive out of passive-aggressive and become quite aggressive. The survivor who is polarized to the outer critic often develops a specious belief that his subjectively derived standards of correctness are objective truth. When triggered, he can use the critic’s combined detective-lawyer-judge function to prosecute the other for betrayal with little or no evidence. Imagined slights, insignificant peccadilloes, misread facial expressions, and inaccurate “psychic” perceptions can be used to put relationships on trial. In the proceedings, the outer critic typically refuses to admit positive evidence. Extenuating circumstances will not be considered in this kangaroo court. Moreover any relational disappointment can render a guilty verdict that sentences the relationship to capital punishment. This is also the process by which jealousy can become toxic and run riot.

  On another level, the outer critic is skilled at building a case to justify occupying a higher moral ground. From this lofty position, the critic then claims the right to micromanage others. Typically this is rationalized as being for the other’s own good. This control, however, is usually wielded on an unconscious level to protect the survivor from any reenactment of early parental abuse or neglect.

  Micromanagement of others also devolves into a host of controlling behaviors. Fight types treat others like captive audiences, give them unsolicited performance evaluations, make unreasonable demands for improvement, and control their time schedules, social calendars and food and clothing choices. In worse case scenarios, they dramatically act out their jealousy, often without cause. At its absolute worst, outer critic relating looks like taking prisoners, not making friends.

  Scapegoating

  Scapegoating is an outer critic process whereby personal frustration is unfairly dumped onto others. Scapegoating is typically fuelled by unworked through anger about childhood abandonment. Displacing anger on the wrong target however, fails to release or resolve old or unrelated hurts.

  Scapegoating is often a reenactment of a parent’s abusive role. It is blind imitation of a parent who habitually released his frustration by indiscriminately raging. When a fight type parent scapegoats those around him, he enforces a perverse kind of mirroring. He is making sure that when he feels bad, so does everyone else. It is like a bumper sticker I saw the other day: “If Momma ain’t happy, Nobody’s happy.”

  I witnessed this common example of scapegoating several times in my childhood. My parents hated anyone who was late. If one of us children were even a minute late for something, they felt absolutely justified in blasting us with their “righteous” indignation. This was true even though we all learned very quickly to be anally punctual. Because of their untreated Cptsd however, their anger was the tip of the iceberg of their unexpressed rage about their own childhood hurts. In this case, they were flashing back to the pain of their parents’ chronic lateness and failure to show up to meet their normal childhood needs.

  MINDFULNESS AND SHRINKING THE OUTER CRITIC

  Reducing outer critic reactivity requires a great deal of mindfulness. This is as essential for fight types who act out aggressively, as it is for those trauma types who internally rant against the entire human group known as “F*cking People!”. It is also of great importance for any survivor who is locked into alienation because of the judgmentalness of his outer critic.

  Mindfulness, once again, is the process of becoming intricately aware of everything that is going on inside us, especially thoughts, images, feelings and sensations. In terms of outer critic work, it is essential that we become more mindful of both the cognitive and emotional content of our thoughts.

  This is the same as in inner critic work, where the two key fronts of critic shrinking are cognitive and emotional. Cognitive work in both cases involves the demolition and rebuilding processes of thought-stopping and thought substitution, respectively. And, emotional work in both instances is grief work. It is removing the critic’s fuel supply - the unexpressed childhood anger and the uncried tears of a lifetime of abandonment.

  When Mindfulness Appears To Intensify The Critic

  In early recovery the outer critic unfortunately seems to become nastier and stronger the more we challenge it. We may even think we are counter-productively stirring it up or making it worse by daring to resist it.

  When mindfulness of the critic seems to strengthen it, we are typically flashing back to how our parents rebuked our early protests at their attacks. This is often impossible to remember because our dysfunctional parents typically kill our protest function before our memory function comes on line. Nonetheless, fear of parental reprisal is often the unconscious dynamic that scares us out of challenging our own toxic thinking. This is why survivors in early recovery often need to invoke the instinct of angry self-protection to empower their thought-stopping.

  There is another dynamic occurring when critic-work seems to strengthen rather than weaken the critic. As we become less dissociated, we begin to notice critic processes that were there all along under the horizon of our awareness. Our childhood survival was aided by learning to dissociate from these painful critic processes. Consequently, many of us come into recovery barely able to even notice the critic.

  Our recovering depends on us using mindfulness to decrease our habits of dissociation. Only then can we see the critic programs that we need to deconstruct, shrink and consciously disidentify from. This typically involves learning to tolerate the pain that comes from discovering how pervasive and strong the critic is. This pain is sometimes a hard pill to swallow because progress in fighting the critic is hard to see at first. And then, even when our shrinking work is effective, progress usually feels disappointingly slow and gradual. This is especially true during a flashback, when the critic can seem to be as strong as ever.

  As stated earlier, the critic grew carcinogenically in childhood. It is like a pervasive cancer that requires many uncomfortable operations to remove. Nonetheless, we can choose to face the acute pain of critic-shrinking work because we want to end the chronic pain of having the critic destroy our enjoyment of life. It is the fight of a lifetime.

  Thought Substitution And Correction: Supplanting the Critic

  Many of us are still developmentally arrested in our need to orient our psyches towards noticing what is good, trustworthy and loveable about others and life in general. In working to shrink the outer critic, thought substitution is the practice of invoking positive thoughts and images of others to help erode the critic’s intimacy-spoiling habit of picking them apart.

  One helpful thought substitution exercise is to list five recollections of positive interactions with a given friend, as well as five of her attributes. This same technique works well when we self-apply it to help us separate from our inner critic’s negative self-image. Toolbox 5, in chapter 16, contains a written exercise to broaden your appreciation of select others who have benefitted you.

  Since thoughts typically give rise to speech, I also recommend that you practice the “5 positives to 1 negative” guideline when giving feedback to a loved one. John Gottman’s research has shown that this ratio is characteristic of how inti
macy-successful couples communicate. This is also key because the outer critic was spawned in childhood by parental modeling that at least reversed this ratio.

  GRIEVING SHORTCIRCUITS THE OUTER CRITIC

  The role of grieving in shrinking the outer critic is as crucial as it is with the inner critic. As with the inner critic, angering at the outer critic helps to silence it, and crying helps to evaporate it.

  We can use the anger of our grief to energize our thought corrections. This helps us to challenge the critic’s entrenched all-or-none perspective that everyone is as dangerous as our parents. Moreover, when our grieving opens into crying, it can release the fear that the outer critic uses to frighten us out of opening to others. Tears can also help us realize that our loneliness is now causing us much unnecessary pain. This in turn can motivate us to open to the possibility of finding safe connections.

  Defueling The Outer Critic Via Working The Transference

  Transference [AKA projection; AKA displacement] occurs when unprocessed feelings from the past amplify present time feelings. A key characteristic of outer critic-dominated flashbacks is that we displace emotional pain from past relationships onto current ones. Transference is the pipeline from the past that supplies the critic with anger to control, attack or disapprove of present relationships.

  As a baby thrives on love, so does the outer critic thrive on anger. Like a parasite, the outer critic gorges on repressed anger, and then erroneously assigns it to present-day disappointments.

  The most common transferrential dynamic that I witness occurs when leftover hurt about a parent gets displaced onto someone we perceive as hurting us in the present. When this occurs, we respond to them with a magnified anger or anguish that is out of proportion to what they did.

  Transference can also grossly distort our perceptions, and sometimes we can misperceive a harmless person as being hurtful. Transference can fire up the critic to imagine slights that do not actually occur. Transference typically runs wild when the outer critic is on a rampage.

  Just as the inner critic transmutes unreleased anger into self-hate, the outer critic uses it to control and /or push others away. Unexpressed and unworked through anger about childhood hurt is a hidden reserve that the critic can always tap into. The anger work of grieving the losses of childhood is so essential because it breaks the critic’s supply line to this anger.

  Grieving out old unexpressed pain about our poor parenting gradually deconstructs the process of transferring it unfairly onto others. This is crucial because love and intimacy are murdered when the critic habitually projects old anger out at an intimate.

  Healthy Outer Critic Venting

  There are times when venting from the outer critic perspective is healthy, self-protective behavior. Sometimes the outer critic’s judgments are accurate. Sometimes people are acting as abusively as our parents did in childhood. In this vein, there are two healthy applications of outer critic aggressiveness. One is to protect ourselves when someone is actually attacking us. The other is in the work of grieving the losses of childhood. As we shall see in the next chapter, survivors benefit immeasurably from angrily judging their parents’ atrocious abuse and negligence.

  Road Rage, Transference And The Outer Critic

  Let us take another look at how the outer critic displaces anger from the past onto present-day relationships.

  My client Johnny came in for his session boiling with road rage. Something infuriating had just occurred on his drive to my office. Before his butt hit the couch, he launched away: “That pompous SOB! People are so obnoxious. Everyone drives like they are the only ones on the road. What a jerk. Driving like he owns the whole road. Not giving a sh*t about anybody but himself. Nobody cares about anybody but themselves. Oh god! Don’t let me get started on my wife. I don’t know why I get out of bed in the morning. This jerk must have forgotten what turn signals are for. I felt like crashing right into that stuck-up bastard and his shiny new Beamer!”

  Johnny radiated anger a full 360 degrees. He hated the driver who had cut him off, all the other drivers on the road, his wife, his employees, his neighbors, the government, and last - but thankfully least - his “overcharging therapist” who was always pretending to be “soooo empathetic.”

  Johnny was a fawn-fight type. Usually he was mostly fawn. In our two years of working together, I had never seen him so enraged, and I was quite taken aback. I was indeed straining to hold an empathic position, but I knew he was in a flashback.

  I encouraged him to further ventilate by hitting a tennis racket on a cushion. [This is a classic anger-release work technique for externalizing anger in a non-harmful way]. Johnny beat it like his life depended on it.

  When his catharting petered out, I asked him to close his eyes. I then suggested that he ask himself if his feelings of outrage had a trail into the past. After a moment he said: “I’m so mad. I don’t want to do anything that you say right now. And it’s weird because I know you’re fishing for my father, but I keep thinking of my mother. She was such a wimp! She’d never drive like that asshole in the Beamer, and she didn’t rant and rave at me like he did, but you know I just feel so pissed at her for putting up with him for all those years, and never once standing up for me or protecting me. It’s bad enough I got him for father, but it’s even more unfair that I got her too”.

  Johnny did another round of venting with the tennis racket: “I thought mothers were programmed to stick up for their kids! You know, like that mother bear sh*t. It’s so unfair…it’s so un-f*cken-believably unfair. I’d just like to shake her out of that numb trance she’d go into. Just shake some freaking sense into her!”

  And then the tears came. Shortly after they subsided, the epiphany arrived. It made him laugh. Genuinely. It was the laughter of relief that we sometimes get when we finally understand why something is really bothering us. He said: “You know this sounds pretty far-fetched and like that psychobabble I hate, but it’s the goddamn unfairness of life that just pisses me off so much. You know that you-got-the-queen-of-spades bad luck. That bad luck of being the one person in the crowd who gets crapped on by a pigeon. That cursed luck of getting dealt those assholes from the parenting deck. It’s so goddamned unfair! Dad and mom’s unfairness was f*cking legendary!

  “And that jerk on the freeway making a lane change without signaling was unfair too. I mean if I hadn’t seen him, I could have gotten into a serious accident. But if I’m honest, it wasn’t really all that bad. I had plenty of time to adjust, and would have been a lousy driver myself if I hadn’t.

  “But, I mean it was still dangerous though. But nothing compared to growing up in that house. Now that was pure, unadulterated danger for you. I guess my rage was mostly about how unfair it was that I had to grow up in that sorry excuse for a home.”

  Road rage and the less intense irritations we experience with our fellow drivers are common forms of outer critic transference. When we become more mindful of our driving frustrations or other minor everyday annoyances, we can look below the tip of this iceberg for old unexpressed anger and hurt that it reminds us of.

  I encourage you to experiment with this next time you are inordinately angry at some driver for a relatively minor driving mistake. You can try asking yourself: “What is this situation or feeling reminding me of?” In the next chapter, we will explore more deeply the processes of grieving through the old hurts that we discover when we get to the bottom of our flashbacks.

  GRIEVING

  Grieving is an irreplaceable tool for resolving the overwhelming feelings that arise during emotional flashbacks. Moreover, grieving is the key process for working through the host of losses that come from growing up in a Cptsd-inducing family.

  We grieve the losses of childhood because these losses are like deaths of important parts of ourselves. Effective grieving brings these parts back to life. In this chapter we describe the healing that is available through the four practices of grieving: angering, crying, verbal ventilating and feeling.<
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  If you find that crying or angering is inaccessible, does not help, or makes you feel worse, then your recovery work my need to focus more on deconstructing and shrinking your inner critic.

  Grieving expands Insight and Understanding

  I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out:

  “It tastes sweet doesn’t it?”

  “You have caught me”, grief answered,

  “And you’ve ruined my business

  How can I sell sorrow, when you know its blessing?” -RUMI

  Insight, as crucially important as it is, is never enough to attain the deeper levels of recovering. No amount of intention or epiphany can bypass a survivor’s need to learn to lovingly care for himself when he is in an emotional flashback. It is crucial that we respond to ourselves with kindness when we are feeling scared, sad, mad, or bad.

  Grieving aids the survivor immeasurably to work through the death-like experience of being lost and trapped in an emotional flashback. Grieving metabolizes our most painful abandonment feelings, especially those that give rise to suicidal ideation, and at their worst, active suicidality.

  Recoverees also need to grieve the death of their early attachment needs. We must grieve the awful fact that safety and belonging was scarce or non-existent in our own families. We need to mourn the myriad heartbreaks of our frustrated attempts to win approval and affection from our parents.