by Pete Walker
Crying And Self-Compassion
When we greet our own tears with self-acceptance, crying awakens our develop- mentally arrested instinct of self-compassion. Once we establish self-compassion through consistent and repeated practice, it becomes the cornerstone of an increasing sense of self-esteem. When an attitude of self-compassion becomes habitual, it can instantly antidote the self-abandonment that so characterizes a flashback.
Moreover self-compassion creates a foundation from which we can build authentic, intimacy-enhancing compassion for others. The depth of our ability to be there for an intimate generally depends on the depth of our capacity to practice unwavering allegiance to ourselves.
Crying And Angering In Concert
Crying and angering are the two key emotional tools for releasing the pain of the abandonment mélange. Typically we need both processes to attain full release.
Crying and angering together differs from whining. Whining is a type of emoting that gives grieving a bad name. Whining is a delicate subject because many people who complain and/or cry in a healthy manner are pathologized as “whiners.” Dysfunctional whining however is often an unhealthy mixture of angering and crying, where either the anger or sadness is repressed but leaks through in a grating manner.
Here are two examples of this. When a hurt person only knows how to express anger, his repressed sadness unconsciously seeps into his anger in a way that makes him sound like a martyr or someone with delusions of persecution. Because there is no substantial release of his sadness, no amount of whining brings him relief, and he can angrily whine endlessly in a way that exhausts his listener’s empathy. Similarly when a hurt person is only able to cry, repressed anger tinges her sadness and makes it sound like irritable and interminable bellyaching. One of my clients calls this “anger coming through a very small hole.”
Many of us suffer from a socialization process that relegates angering to men and crying to women. From an early age boys are shamed for crying while girls are treated similarly for angering. Hence boys become men who can only vent their emotional pain through angering. Sadness then must morph into an irritable mood, aggravated whining or angry catharsis. Similarly, some women unconsciously try to squeeze their anger out by whining or crying in a way that devolves into feeling stuck in helplessness and self-pity.
Many men also rely on anger to carry all of their emotional expression. They get mad when they are scared, humiliated or feel down. Many women, on the other hand, can only try to cry out these feelings. This typically results in a very incomplete release. The full motion of emotion is arrested. Half of the normal emotional release process is then stymied in each gender.
Without complete emoting of his hurt, a survivor can become stuck in moodiness. His unexpressed emotion deteriorates into a stagnant and lingering mood. This moodiness can range from festering resentment to a shame-tainted self-pity that is anything but self-compassionate. Blocked anger can degenerate into bitter sullenness, and blocked sadness can deteriorate into melancholic self-indulgence.
How this contrasts with the healthy grieving of my six-year old son, who has to periodically grieve the loss of his narcissistic entitlement. Less and less does he get to be what Freud called: “His majesty the baby”.
As his previously apt entitlement lessens, he mildly bawls at new rules that are age-appropriate for him to learn. Bawling is the evolution of the baby’s angry cry, and it releases pain through angry crying. He howled a bit this afternoon about the “unfairness” of having to do his homework after school before he could play some more.
As we climbed the 37 stairs to our home, he punctuated his crying with a flurry of angry condemnations: “I don’t like you daddy. You’re not fair. I’m not going to be your friend”. I am grateful for this healthy grieving, and still somewhat amazed that I can so calmly “hold” it as I help him metabolize this latest loss of early childhood narcissistic privilege.
By the time we get to the top of the stairs he opens the door and genuinely peals out a guileless laugh: “Daddy, look! Picachu fell off the table. Daddy can we play Pokémon after I practice writing my letters?”
Grieving has almost instantly delivered him from painful loss into eager apprehension of what is fun about life and what there is to look forward to. How frequently, I see my clients reemerge into remembering their real, present-day resourcefulness once they have grieved through a painful flashback.
When we can both anger and cry while re-experiencing our early abandonment in a flashback, we can obtain a more complete release from the abandonment mélange. Each survivor does well to assess whether his angering or crying is blocked or stultified, and to then work at recovering it.
There are of course numerous men and women who are reverse examples of the gender polarization mentioned above. Moreover, there are many survivors in whom both angering and crying are blocked. They also benefit inordinately from rescuing the healing balm of both anger and tears from the stultifying prohibitions of the critic.
If you are unable cry or feel angry, focusing on your breath may help you to emote. This is especially true if you attend to the sensations in your abdominal region as it expands and contracts during respiration. Deep, slow and rhythmic breathing stretches and expands various visceral muscles and internal organs in ways that sometimes bring feelings into awareness.
If this does not help, Holotropic Rebirthing and Reichian therapy employ special breathing techniques to help free stuck emotions. I know many survivors who first reclaimed their capacity to emote through these techniques.
3. Verbal Ventilation: The Golden Path To Intimacy
“Joy shared is doubled. Sorrow shared is halved.” - Old Chinese saying
Verbal ventilation is the third process of grieving. It is the penultimate resolver of emotional flashbacks. Verbal ventilation is speaking or writing in a manner that airs out and releases painful feelings. When we let our words spring from what we feel, language is imbued with emotion, and pain can be released through what we say, think or write. As our grieving proficiency increases, we can verbally ventilate about our losses, using shame-dissolving language to tell the story of how we were unfairly deprived of our birthright to be welcomed into a family that cherished us.
My favorite technique to enhance verbal ventilation is to encourage the survivor to talk in an uncensored manner about whatever comes to his mind while he focuses on his feelings. If his feelings are not in awareness, focusing on bodily sensations can provide rich grist for verbally venting.
Verbal Ventilation is therapeutic to the degree that a person’s words are colored by and descriptive of the anger, sadness, fear, shame and/or depression she feels. Ventilation that is liberally punctuated with actual crying or angering is especially powerful.
Theoretical Neuroscience Of Verbal Ventilation
Verbal ventilation is a tool that can remediate brain changes that are caused by Cptsd. Susan Vaughan’s MRI research demonstrates that emotional flashbacks over-activate the emotionally oriented right-brain and under-activate the thinking-oriented left-brain. With this hemispheric polarization, there is an overwhelming reemergence of childhood pain that is emotionally remembered by the memory-oriented right-brain. At the same time, the survivor loses access to the higher cognitive functions of her left-brain. This temporary loss of cognitive perspective explains why it is so hard for a survivor to realize that she is only flashing back, and not really lost in the danger, helplessness and hopelessness of the past.
Verbal ventilation, at its most potent, is the therapeutic process of bringing left-brain cognition to intense right-brain emotional activation. It fosters the recoveree’s ability to put words to feelings, and ultimately to accurately interpret and communicate about his various feeling states. When this process is repeated sufficiently, new neural pathways grow that allow the left- and right-brain to work together so that the person can actually think and feel at the same time.
The corpus callosum is the part of the brain that connects t
he left and right hemispheres. Research shows that the corpus callosum is smaller in some Cptsd survivors. Further research shows that the brain can generate new neurons and new neuronal connections to remedy this situation.
Thinking And Feeling Simultaneously
When a survivor becomes proficient at verbal ventilation, she heals a crucial developmental arrest. She learns to think about feeling states in a way that creates healthy, helpful and appropriate responses to feelings. These responses are characteristically respectful to herself and to whomever she is with. In his book, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman writes that this is a core trait of emotional intelligence.
With continued practice, verbal ventilation coordinates the left and right hemispheres of the brain so that whenever the right-brain is hyper-activated in flashback, the left-brain is also fully engaged [this also can be seen in an MRI]. With the left-brain back on line, the survivor can remember to use the flashback management steps to successfully help manage a flashback.
As with angering and crying, verbal ventilation is only effective when it is liberated from the critic’s control. In early recovery, verbal ventilation can easily shift into verbal self-flagellation. Verbally ventilating from the self-attacking or drasticizing perspective of the critic is rarely effective grieving. Instead it typically triggers or intensifies flashbacks, which in turn frequently generates self- and intimacy-injuring behavior.
Many survivors in early recovery are unable to notice their unconscious shifts into over-identifying with the critic’s point of view. When this is the case, they usually need the help of a therapist or sufficiently recovered intimate to help them recognize and neutralize the critic.
Verbal Ventilation is an especially transformative grieving process. It not only promotes the same type of fear-release and shame-dissolution as angering and crying, but also helps to expose the manifold guises of the critic’s self-attack and fear-arousal programs. Verbal ventilation also helps us to identify and communicate about needs that have long been unmet because of our childhood abandonment.
Verbally Ventilating Alone
Verbally venting alone, where no one else can hear you, is a helpful therapeutic technique. Untraumatized children do it frequently in their play, much to their great benefit. If your room is not private, you can drive your car to somewhere that is.
Typically it takes considerable silencing of the critic to regain this therapeutic tool. This tool is so powerful and restorative that it is worth many skirmishes with the critic to reclaim it for your Cptsd toolbox.
One of my clients kept an 18” length of rubber hose and a phone book on the passenger seat of her car. During the year that she was doing the lion’s share of her anger work, she would hit the hose loudly on the phonebook whenever her brainwashing, abusive father came up in her mind. She would of course pull over for this, and found over time that she could do it inconspicuously in places with surprisingly limited privacy. It was remarkable to me how much critic-shrinking she did in that year.
Dissociation Deadens Verbal Ventilation
It is important to differentiate verbal ventilation from dissociative flights of fantasy and obsessive bouts of unproductive worrying. Dissociation is a defense that children develop to distract and protect themselves from the overwhelming pain of their abandonment. As unsupported children, we have to dissociate because we are not able to effectively grieve. We have to protect ourselves by not allowing the full brunt of our pain into awareness.
As we saw in chapter 6, there are two common types of dissociation: right-brain dissociation and left-brain dissociation.
Right-brain dissociation can be seen as classical dissociation and as the defense most common to freeze types. It is the right-brain process of numbing out against intense feeling or incessant inner critic attack. Dissociation is once again a process of distraction. Survivors commonly experience it as getting lost in fantasy, fogginess, TV, tiredness or sleep.
Verbally reporting from a place of self-distraction is in fact the opposite of verbal ventilation. Getting lost in daydream-like descriptions of improbable salvation fantasies is a common way that clients avoid their pain in a therapy session. Another common example is recounting long elaborate dreams that are devoid of emotional content or serious attempts at introspection.
Early in my career, I worked briefly with a freeze-fight type client who was stuck in an avoidance process of endlessly monologing about her dreams. Dina recalled them in lifeless, excruciating detail. In fact, her deadened delivery was emblematic of the way she talked about almost everything.
Dina was an intern-therapist who locked up her vulnerability with a belief that dream work was the piece de resistance of therapy. My attempts to guide her into exploring her deeper underlying experience were routinely met with the hackles of her fight response. I was unfortunately not experienced enough at the time to help her see that this was a dissociative defense that she had constructed as a child to protect herself from a very intrusive mother. Sadly, she left therapy disgruntled and still trapped in the isolation that was born of alienating others with her distant, abstract and non-interactive dissertations.
Left-Brain Dissociation
Left-brain dissociation is obsessiveness. Commonly, this ranges in severity from dwelling on a singular worry… to repetitively cycling through a list of worries… to panicky drasticizing and catastrophizing. This type of dissociation from internal pain strands the survivor in unhelpful ruminations about issues that are unrelated or minimally related to the true nature of her suffering.
This is an example of this. Your friend complains incessantly about the bad weather or the unfairness of people who do not use their turn signals. He cannot stop grumbling because no amount of complaining about the wrong thing releases the real pain that is driving his obsessive grievance. If he were able to look deeper at what is really troubling him, he might learn that his wife’s constructive feedback is continuously flashing him back into the fear and shame he felt when his mother verbally abused him.
Left-brain dissociation can also be a process of trivialization. This occurs when the survivor over-focuses on superficial external concerns to distract himself from upsetting inner experience. Becoming overly preoccupied with sports statistics or the lives of Hollywood celebrities are common examples of this. This is not, of course, to say that such interests are not worthwhile when they are pursued with moderation.
Finally, left-brain dissociation can also be seen in intellectualization. This is what the novelist, Ian McEwan, called the “high-walled fortress of focused thinking”. Some survivors over-rely on reasoning and lofty dialogue to protect themselves from the potentially messy and painful world of feeling. Even the highest levels of creative thinking can deteriorate into an obsessive defense when they are excessively engaged.
Verbal Ventilation Heals Abandonment
When we share what is emotionally important to us, we learn to connect with others in a meaningful and healing way. This applies to sharing concerns that excite and please us, as well as those that frighten or depress us. Perhaps there was no more detrimental consequence of our childhood abandonment than being forced to habitually hide our authentic selves. Many of us come out of childhood believing that what we have to say is as uninteresting to others as it was to our parents.
We must repudiate this damaging legacy of the past. Verbal ventilation is the key way that people make friends. It parallels the way tender touch, soothing voice, and welcoming facial expressions helps infants and toddlers establish bonding and attachment. When we practice the emotionally based communication of verbal ventilation in a safe environment, we repair the damage of not having had this need met in childhood. This in turn opens up the possibility of finally attaining the verbal-emotional intimacy that is an essential lifelong need for all human beings.
Committing to this type of practice typically requires courage and perseverance. Authentic sharing can be triggering, and sometimes flashes the survivor back to being puni
shed or rejected for being vulnerable. Therapy, individual or group, can help greatly to overcome and work through these obstacles to vitalizing your self-expression.
Verbal Ventilation And Intimacy
Reciprocal verbal ventilation is the highway to intimacy in adult relationships. Sufficient practice with a safe enough other brings genuine experiences of comforting and restorative connection. For me and many of my clients, such experiences are more alleviating of loneliness than we had ever thought possible.
Nowhere is this truer than with mutual commiseration. Mutual commiseration is the process in which two intimates are reciprocally sympathetic to each other’s troubles and difficulties. It is the deepest most intimate channel to intimacy – profounder than sex. Mutual commiseration also typically promotes a spontaneous opening into many levels of light-hearted and spontaneous connecting.
As deep and meaningful connection with another becomes more available and frequent, the survivor increasingly experiences the shrinking of his abandonment depression.
I must reiterate here that some popular bodywork approaches to trauma belittle the usefulness of talk therapy. While somatic work is a vital tool of recovery, it alone cannot shrink your toxic critic or resuscitate your self-expression. Cognitive work, especially that which is empowered by verbal ventilation, is fundamental to Cptsd recovery.