INTRODUCTION

If you’re in immediate distress, please turn to chapter 8, and read the list of 13 steps for reducing Cptsd fear and stress.

Forty years ago, I was riding on a train in India travelling from Delhi to Calcutta. I was at the end of a failed, yearlong spiritual quest in India. Instead of enlightenment, my salvation fantasy had only netted me despair and amoebic dysentery. The latter cost me thirty pounds of flesh, and left me looking like an emaciated monk.

Even worse was the absolute loss of the hope that had been inflamed by reading Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.” This hope had supported me through five years of world travel after I was unceremoniously kicked out of my family home.

But, back to the train. I was sitting in my cramped second class seat with the untouchables, chickens and goats, reading an English version of an Indian newspaper. The paper informed me that my destination, Calcutta, was now inundated with 100,000 refugees from Bangladesh who had just fled their flood–swamped homes. They were all apparently sleeping on the downtown streets in the recesses beneath the protruding second floors of all the buildings that lined the streets.

I came in late at night and sure enough, sleeping bodies wrapped in sheets, shoulder to shoulder, lined the streets everywhere. I checked into a twenty cents-a-night hotel that a fellow traveler had told me about. I slept unevenly, dreading the sight that I would behold the next morning. How would I handle viewing masses of desperate people, especially when I had nothing to give? I doubted that I even had enough money to make it to Australia where I could hopefully replenish my wallet.

When I finally nudged myself down the stairs late the next morning, I was aghast at the transformed scene on the streets. Sheets had been spread out like picnic blankets and each hosted happy families. Little portable stoves produced meals and cups of tea. People bantered with incredible vitality and enthusiasm, and children...children [this was the part that emblazoned on my memory] crawled all over their parents, especially their fathers in affectionate playful gymnastics that their fathers seemed to love as much as they did.

I was flooded with a mélange of feelings unlike anything I’d ever experienced before - a strange cocktail of relief, delight and anxiety. The anxiety I wouldn’t understand until ten years later when I realized that envy had been percolating below the surface of my awareness.

I was deeply envious of this gorgeous buffet of familial love that I had never experienced or even witnessed before. The family sitcoms – even the syrupy sweet ones - that I had watched growing up came nowhere near creating such an authentic, tactile representation of healthy bonding and attachment.

When I realized what this was years later as an anthropology and social work student, I positively flashed back to other non-industrial countries where I had seen similar scenes on a less grand level: Morocco, Thailand, Bali, and an Aboriginal reserve in Australia.

These memories also viscerally informed me about the kind of relational love I had never seen in my own or my friends’ families. As I digested this experience over the years and used it to overcome my denial about what I had missed out on as a child, I began the decades long quest that has lead me to write this book as well as The Tao of Fully Feeling, which precedes it. The Tao of Fully Feeling is a companion to this book and elaborates many of the foundational principles of this book.

This book then is my hopeful effort to create a map that you can follow to heal the wounds that come from not enough childhood love. If I am a bit repetitive at times about issues like shrinking the critic and grieving the losses of childhood, it is my attempt to find different ways to emphasize the great importance of engaging these themes of recovery work over and over again. If you find yourself lost and not sure of how to get back onto the map, these themes will always be key portals for reentry.

I sometimes recommend that readers view the table of contents and start with whatever headings most strike a chord. Although the book is laid out in a somewhat linear fashion, everyone’s journey of recovering is different, and journeys can be initiated in a variety of ways.

Journeys of recovering may begin when a death or great loss brings up an emotional storm that opens up a hidden reservoir of childhood pain; or when a friend shares something about his or her recovery process that strikes a chord; or when a book or TV show triggers a more serious consideration of what really happened in childhood; or when something gets “opened up” in couple’s therapy; or when a healing crisis in the form of panic attacks or a nervous breakdown requires some outside help; or when the self-medicating strategies developed to soothe depression and anxiety get out of control and also require outside help.

I hope that readers will be able to use this book as a textbook for recovering, and that certain sections will call you back or forward to them repeatedly, as over time and with effective work, certain themes continue to take on ever deepening meaning.

In this vein, you will find that the Table of Contents is quite comprehensive, and sometimes the best way to use this book is to browse through it and then read the sections and chapters that most capture your interest.

Moreover, this is not a one size fits all formula for recovering. Depending on the specific pattern of your childhood trauma, some of the advice contained herein may be less relevant or even irrelevant to you. Please then focus on the material that seems applicable and helpful to you.

I also hope this map will guide you to heal in a way that helps you become an unflinching source of kindness and self-compassion for yourself, and that out of that journey you will find at least one other human being who will reciprocally love you well enough in that way.

Finally I have illustrated this work with many real life examples. All names and identifying information have been changed to protect client confidentiality.