IMPROVING RELATIONSHIPS

Forewarning:

There are instances of parental betrayal so extreme, that it is not fair or reasonable to expect the survivor to try to trust human beings again. If the recommendation in this chapter to open to the help of others feels too upsetting or overwhelming, please feel free to skip this chapter. There is a great deal of other material in this book that can help alleviate the many symptoms of Cptsd, and since recovery is relative and never complete, you do not need to implement everything in this book. As they say in the Twelve Step Movement: “Take the best and leave the rest.”

Moreover, as I have experienced personally, and as numerous of my clients and website respondents have demonstrated to me, real relational healing can and does come from non-human sources. This is especially true of mammalian pets whose attachment needs and wiring are similar enough to ours that mutually healing connections can evolve between us. Dogs and cats can be a tremendous source of what Carl Rogers describes as the “unconditional positive regard” that young children must have in order to thrive.

Other therapeutic relational sources include nature, music and the arts. Moreover, for some survivors, authors of helpful books can be kept at safe distances while they contribute to your healing.

Finally, even with the most heinous betrayals, miracles sometime happen in terms of discovering a healing human connection, particularly in the later stages of recovery.

Cptsd As An Attachment Disorder

Many therapists see Cptsd as an attachment disorder. This means that as a child the survivor grew up without a safe adult to healthily bond with. As bears repeating, Cptsd almost always has emotional neglect at its core. A key outcome of this is that the child has no one in his formative years who models the relational skills that are necessary to create intimacy.

When the developmental need to practice healthy relating with a caretaker is unmet, survivors typically struggle to find and maintain healthy supportive relationships in their adult lives.

The Origin Of Social Anxiety

A child who grows up with no reliable human source of love, support and protection typically falls into a great deal of social unease. He “naturally” becomes reluctant to seek support from anyone, and he is forced to adopt self-sufficiency as a survival strategy.

Needing anything from others can feel especially dangerous. The survivor’s innate capacity to experience comfort and support in relationship becomes very limited or non-existent. This is despite the fact that many high functioning survivors learn to socially function quite adequately.

This is particularly the case in structured situations where expectations are clear and common goals take the focus off conversing and put it on task accomplishments. Unstructured social situations however, like attending parties or just hanging out can be considerably more triggering. Spontaneous self-expression feels like the same setup for disaster that it was in childhood.

Either way, structured or spontaneous, relating often involves hiding a great deal of anxiety and discomfort. One very successful businessman client of mine told me: “I’m so cool, calm and collected in meetings. A veritable wordsmith with the composure of Michael Caine. I’m a king on the outside, but on the inside I’m a drama queen anguishing in doubt and shame about everything I say or do.”

In worst case scenarios, social anxiety can devolve into social phobia, especially during prolonged flashbacks. Extensive childhood abuse installs a powerful people-are-dangerous program.

When I was at my least recovered, I couldn’t take out the garbage when I was in flashback. I feared that my neighbor – my sweet, always affirming neighbor – would look out the window and see how wretched and pitiful I was. Even worse, I dreaded the prospect that she might come out and want to interact with me.

Nonetheless, I socialized for decades when necessary, and seemed to be doing it with a considerable amount of success, no matter how dreadful the reviews were from my critic. I even eventually came to see, when not in flashback, that a lot of people really liked me.

Unfortunately, however, I rarely derived any satisfaction or comfort from this perception, because underneath my smooth persona, I was writhing in discomfort, and typically measuring the time until I could least obtrusively make my escape.

A Journey Of Relational Healing

The incident I am about to describe marked a huge step in my long, gradual journey of opening to real intimacy. I was sitting on my porch with my dog George, the only being I could truly relax with, when he broke his lead and sprinted across the street in pursuit of a cat. Before he could get to the cat, he was run over by a car – both axels-run over. It was the worst thing that ever happened in my adult life, and when the shock [dissociation] wore off, I was drowning in the abandonment mélange.

Beyond devastated, I felt panicky and catatonic at the same time. As I had to in childhood when feeling overwhelmed, I hid in my room for thirty-six hours - dreading contact with my fair weather friend-roommates. I was 28 and still thoroughly phobic about showing any vulnerability. All my relationships had been developed under the guise of my people-pleasing, funny guy persona, and in my current state there was not a joke anywhere to be found. There was no way I would let myself be seen in what felt like a repulsive condition.

I could not sleep, and as sleep deprivation deteriorated into a fear that I was truly going crazy, out of nowhere came this amazing grace. Grace disguised in a form I usually abhorred. It was the grace of a deep surrender into weeping - a long sobbing release more soothing than anything I had ever experienced before.

It was the release I describe in chapter 11 and extensively throughout my first book. When the tears were cried out I knew I would be okay and I knew I was not going to go crazy. I could face my roommates with the realest, perhaps the first sense of self-esteem I had ever known. And from that point on, I knew I wanted more of these incredibly healing tears.

Healing The Shame That Binds Us In Loneliness

I soon discovered however, that my tears were as stuck as they had ever been, or at least since I was six – the last time I could remember crying. Further reading and researching then lead me to seek help, and so ensued my baptism into therapy, blessed by the great fortune of finding a good enough therapist on the first try.

This was a milestone achievement for me, and it evolved into a long meandering journey of finding more relational help with an array of healers, therapists, therapeutic groups and deeper friendships. These experiences ranged from extremely helpful to counter-therapeutic, but as time went on they became increasingly helpful.

A central aspect of the truly helpful relational work was what John Bradshaw called “healing the shame that binds.” I believe toxic shame cannot be healed without some relational help. Several therapists and groups aided me greatly to unbind from the shame that made me hide whenever I could not invoke my perfect persona. Concurrently, I learned that real intimacy correlated with the amount I shared my vulnerabilities. As I increasingly practiced emotional authenticity, the glacier of my lifelong loneliness began to melt.

It is important to note here that groups can be even more powerful for the healing of shame than individual work. This is because there is typically more mutual vulnerability in a group than in individual work. Moreover, feeling compassion for someone who has suffered similarly to us sometimes naturally expands into feeling the same for ourselves.

Therapeutic relational experiences enhanced my self-compassion considerably further than what I was able to accomplish on my own. Moreover, I believe that insufficient self-compassion is the worst developmental arrest of all, and restored self-compassion is the keystone of all effective recovery.

In retrospect I can clearly see that as my self-compassion increased, my toxic shame decreased. Modern advances in neuroscience [see: A General Theory of Love] suggest that we are intrinsically limited in our ability to emotionally regulate and soothe ourselves. More and more research suggests that our ability to metabolize painful emotional states is enhanced by communicating with a safe enough other person.

Finding Good Enough Relational Help

In chapter 13, I provide guidance about how to shop for a good enough therapist. I also explore more deeply the principles of therapeutic relational healing to help you know what is reasonable to expect from your therapist.

I have also met a number of survivors who have been lucky enough to get this kind of relational healing from a partner or a friend, typically one who had good enough parents or who “has a lot of recovery”.

Finally, attachment theorists have developed the concept of earned secure attachment to describe the recovered enough state where the attachment disorder of Cptsd becomes sufficiently healed. This is typically evidenced by the survivor forming at least one supportive and reliable enough relationship.

Many of the successful therapies I have guided come to an end when the client gains an earned secure relationship outside of our therapy. This is typically a partner or best friend with whom the person can truly be themselves.

Another potential source of relational healing is the co-counseling relationship. Guidelines for creating a co-counseling relationship are also contained in chapter 13.

Many respondents to my website have reported glowingly about the help they get from others through online recovery groups and forums. These groups can be particularly helpful for those who still find it difficult to be vulnerable in person. Sometimes the distance and relative anonymity of these forums can decrease the fear of self-disclosure, and this in turn can enhance therapeutic relating. An increasing number of therapists also seem to be offering telephone sessions for this same reason.

The section “Finding an online group” in chapter 13, lists recommended online groups.

Parentdectomy And Relational Healing

I have worked with many clients who began therapy with me while they were still over-controlled by their traumatizing parents – both externally, as well as internally. Sometimes the control was enforced by as little as one phone call a week.

Not infrequently, these clients were also being overpowered and /or abandoned in relationships as abusive and neglectful as the ones they had with their parents. This is repetition compulsion at its most destructive, and it strands survivors in experiencing the worst of both worlds.

Through in depth exploration of their childhood trauma, many of my still-trapped clients achieved psychological freedom from their parents for the first time in their lives. Once again, this was a freedom that they had not actually achieved even though they had been living on their own for decades.

These clients gradually learned to live more successfully on their own without their parents over-controlling spoiling influence. Their ability to build self-nurturing relationships with themselves almost always correlated with a major reduction or complete severing of their relationships with their parents.

My client, Joe, who was variously misdiagnosed as Schizoid, Asperger’s, and Paranoid, was living alone when he began therapy with me. He was extremely shut down and self-contained but recognized himself as a freeze type from reading articles on my website.

Getting him to talk at first was like pulling teeth, but over time I discovered that he was engaged in daily phone contact with his narcissistic, emasculating mother. Through our work and tremendous courage on his part, he gradually reduced the phone contact with his mother: at first to once a week, then once a month, then only major holidays, and after a few years to almost never.

When a parent is unrelentingly toxic, hearing even a few words from them can trigger the survivor into an intense emotional flashback. I have worked with numerous clients who made very little progress in their recovery while they maintained contact with the toxic parent[s]. For this reason, such clients usually require a parentdectomy to progress. There is a classic book by Bob Hoffman on this topic entitled Getting Divorced from Mother & Dad.

As external freedom from “smother-mothering” continued, Joe gradually achieved more and more internal freedom from her. During this time he began to experience the first meaningful relating of his life in an ACA group that for many years provided him with a great deal of positive companionship and relational healing. Joe finally concluded therapy with me when a healthy primary relationship that he formed with a group member reached the two year mark.

Learning To Handle Conflict In Relationship

One caveat for recovering the ability to authentically be yourself is that it is unreasonable and unfair to expect anyone to accept you if you are being abusively angry or contemptuous. Some trauma survivors flashback into this type of behavior by acting out from their Outer Critic. If this is an issue for you, chapter 10 provides guidance for deconstructing this intimacy-destroying habit.

In this vein, it is important to note that intimacy does not mean unconditional love. As John Gottman’s scholarly research shows, a certain amount of disagreement, disaffection and disappointment is normal in relationship. The hallmark of successful couples is their ability to handle feelings of anger and hurt in a constructive and civil way. Gottman’s studies have identified this as a key characteristic of couples who still really like each other after ten years.

“Tools for Lovingly Resolving Conflict” [Toolbox 4 in chapter 16] is a pragmatic list of techniques and perspectives to help couples resolve disruptions in their mutual attunement. Moreover, books by the Gottmans and Sue Johnson provide a great deal of practical help. I also find that Beyond The Marriage Fantasy, by Dan Beaver is especially helpful for men.

Reparenting

Reparenting is a key aspect of relational healing. It is primarily a process of addressing the many developmentally arrested needs of the traumatized child that we were. In this book we repeatedly address the two most fundamental of these needs: love and protection.

“Suggested Intentions for Recovery” [Toolbox 1 in chapter 16] renders yet another picture of the diverse developmental arrests that may as yet be unaddressed in the Cptsd survivor. The toolbox presents these needs as tangible goals that we can use to direct our recovery efforts.

Self-Mothering And Self-Fathering

An important, yin/yang dynamic of reparenting involves balancing self-mothering and self-fathering. When a child’s mothering needs are adequately met, self-compassion is installed at the core of her being. When the same is true of her fathering needs, self-protection also becomes deeply imbedded.

Self-compassion is the domicile of recovery, and self-protection is its foundation. When self-compassion is sufficiently established as a “home base” to return to in difficult times, an urge to be self-protective naturally arises from it. Living in the world without access to these primal instincts of survival is truly terrifying.

We advance our recovery process immeasurably when we commit to re-mothering and re-fathering ourselves. I encourage you now to commit to becoming an unshakeable source of compassion and protection for yourself.

Self-Mothering Grows Self-Compassion

The most essential task of self-mothering is building a deeply felt sense that we are lovable and deserve to be loved. Self-mothering is the practice of loving and accepting the inner child in all phases of his mental, emotional, and physical experience. [If “inner child” is a problematic concept for any reason, you can imagine nurturing the developmentally arrested part of yourself.]

Self-mothering is based on the precept that unconditional love is every child’s birthright. Recovering from the loss of unconditional love is problematic. Not getting enough of it as children was the greatest loss we had. Sadly, this loss can never be completely remediated, because unconditional love is only appropriate and developmentally helpful during the first two years or so of life.

After this time, the toddler has to begin to learn that human love comes with some conditions. Although love still needs to be copious at this time, the child must be gently shown that behaviors like hitting, biting and breaking things are not acceptable. The period of conditional love has begun and is successfully guided via a very gradual increase in learning about necessary and healthy limits and rules.

The toddler who receives good enough parenting learns relatively easily to survive the very gradually diminishing supply of unconditional love. During this time she learns little by little that other people also have rights and needs. Her absolute entitlement to gratification is coming to an end, and the needs of her parents will not always be forfeited to accommodate her.

Once again, psychological health is based on having about two years of this no questions asked entitlement to unconditional love. It is the normal healthy narcissism that Freud described as “His Majesty the Baby”.

Serious problems accrue however when the toddler does not begin to learn that there are limits to his original entitlement. If there are no limits for too long, then the journey toward adult narcissism begins. On the other hand, if there are too many limits too soon, the matrix of trauma begins to form.

Enlightened parents introduce limits slowly but surely. They do it at such a rate that by the time the child reaches adolescence he can balance satisfying his needs with helping his intimates to satisfy theirs. He learns to be sharing and reciprocal, a developmental task that is essential to keeping intimacy alive in his life.

Cptsd is a syndrome of the dearth of unconditional love, or what the great therapist, Carl Rogers, called “unconditional positive regard”. Cptsd can also occur when unconditional love is shut off in an all-or-nothing way in early childhood.

Some parents can shower love on babies. But as soon as the child begins toddling around and expressing a will of her own, they become severely punishing and rejecting.

The Limits Of Unconditional Love

The terrible absence of love - or its abrupt premature termination - is extremely painful and its loss is very difficult to address. We cannot help desperately wanting the unconditional love we were so unfairly deprived of, but we cannot, as adults, expect others to supply our unmet early entitlement needs.

The one exception to this is therapy, but that of course is usually only one or two hours a week. Miraculously, I have seen the unconditional positive regard of the therapist be enough on numerous occasions to significantly repair the damage of not being parentally loved. And when it is enough, the therapist’s consistent caring facilitates the awakening of the developmentally arrested need to hold yourself with enough unconditional love.

We survivors often struggle with managing our understandable but unrealistic yearnings to receive permanent unconditional love from a friend or partner. Like the toddler, we eventually have to accept the limits of adult love. This is especially true in romance where the intoxication of unconditional love rarely lasts for more than year. Around this time, partners inevitably begin to feel some frustration with each other because of differences in their individual needs.

Nonetheless, romantic love can be a significant source of therapeutic unconditional-like love, especially when it survives the inevitability of some disappointment. Susan Campbell’s A Couples’ Journey is a pragmatic, research-based book on how to reap more intimacy out of normal relationship disappointments

Inner Child Work

Let us return to the concept of self-mothering. As mother to ourselves, we commit to increasing our self-compassion and unconditional positive regard. Self-mothering is a resolute refusal to indulge in self-hatred and self-abandonment. It proceeds from the realization that self-punishment is counterproductive. It is enhanced by the understanding that patience and self-encouragement are more effective than self-judgment and self-rejection in achieving recovery.

You can enhance your self-mothering skills by imaginatively creating a safe place in your heart where your inner child and your present time self are always welcome. Consistent tenderness towards yourself welcomes the child into the adult body you now inhabit, and shows him that it is now a nurturing place protected by a warm and powerful adult.

Self-mothering can be enhanced by thought-correcting the critic’s negative messages with healing words that the child in all likelihood never heard from his parents. A client of mine once shared this pearl of wisdom with me: “Thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries - as good for you as sunlight is, or as bad for you as poison.”

Here then are some useful messages for nurturing the growth of your self-compassion and self-esteem. I recommend that you imagine speaking them to your inner child, especially when you are suffering with a flashback.

Reparenting Affirmations

I am so glad you were born.

You are a good person.

I love who you are and am doing my best to always be on your side.

You can come to me whenever you’re feeling hurt or bad.

You do not have to be perfect to get my love and protection.

All of your feelings are okay with me.

I am always glad to see you.

It is okay for you to be angry and I won’t let you hurt yourself or others when you are.

You can make mistakes - they are your teachers.

You can know what you need and ask for help.

You can have your own preferences and tastes.

You are a delight to my eyes.

You can choose your own values.

You can pick your own friends, and you don’t have to like everyone.

You can sometimes feel confused and ambivalent, and not know all the answers.

I am very proud of you.

Self-Fathering And Time Machine Rescue Operation

Many abandoned children enter adulthood feeling that the world is a dangerous place where they are ill-equipped to defend themselves. While self-mothering focuses primarily on healing the wounds of neglect, self-fathering heals the wounds of being helpless to protect yourself from parental abuse, and by extension from other abusive authority figures.

Self-fathering aims at building assertiveness and self-protection. It includes learning to effectively confront external and/or internal abuse, as well as standing up for the adult child’s rights, as described in Tool Box 2 of chapter 16. Many survivors benefit greatly from classes and books on assertiveness training.

One of my favorite self-fathering exercises is the time machine rescue operation. I have used it to help myself and to help clients. With clients I use it to model a process for fighting off the overwhelming sense of helplessness that often accompanies emotional flashbacks.

This is a version of the time machine rescue operation that I use with myself as well as with my clients. I tell my inner child that, if time travel is ever possible, I will travel back into the past and put a stop to my parents’ abusiveness. In the course of this I say things like: “I’ll call 911. I’ll call CPS [Child Protective Services] on them. I will grab their arms and pin them behind their backs the second they try to strike you. I will muffle them with a gag so they can’t scream at you or even mumble their criticisms. I’ll put bags over their heads so they can’t frown or glare at you. I’ll send them to bed without dessert. I’ll do anything you want me to do to protect you.”

Such imagery often provides me an exit out of fear and shame, and sometimes even makes my inner child laugh in delight. I sometimes finish this exercise by telling my inner child I would also report my parents to the authorities so they would be sent to counseling to learn how to be a better parent.

Or, I say that, if I could, I would take him back to live with me in the future before all those horrible things could happen to him. I remind him that he in fact lives in the present with me now, where I will always do my best to protect him. We now have a powerful body, greater skills of self-protection and access to allies and a legal system that will protect us.

When the recoveree consistently welcomes his inner child in every aspect of his being, the child feels increasingly safe and becomes more and more alive and self-expressive. As he experiences his adult self consistently rising to his defense, he will feel safe enough to begin accessing his innate vitality, playfulness, curiosity, and spontaneity.

Reparenting By Committee

Reparenting at its best is a yin/yang dynamic that balances the mutually enhancing processes of reparenting by others and self-reparenting. Reparenting sometimes needs to be initiated and modeled by someone else, such as a therapist, a sponsor, a kind friend or supportive group to show us how to self-reparent ourselves.

Alternatively, many survivors instinctively initiate reparenting by others, via entering what one of my clients describes as “the community of books”. They receive reparenting from authors who encourage them to value and support themselves.

Alice was such a survivor. Her family traumatized her during childhood so thoroughly that she quickly learned that being vulnerable around others was dangerous, foolish and totally out of the question. Yet the urge to get the support and the help she was so unfairly deprived of worked its way back into her awareness via a strong attraction to self-help books. By reading a great deal of psychology, she eventually found enough help that she began to think that there might be a kind, safe and helpful person out there in the flesh and entered into some very helpful therapy. [Chapter 15, Bibliotherapy, contains my favorite recommendations for therapeutic self-help books].

I too went through a long gradual process of reading and attending lectures before I was able to take the frightening and embarrassing plunge into therapy, where, as stated earlier, I was fortunate enough to find a good enough therapist to take my relational healing to the next level.

Therapy allowed me to internalize and mimic my therapists’ consistent and reliable stance of being on my side. This in turn led me to gravitate toward safer and more truly intimate friendships. I have seen this same result with numerous clients and friends.

Eventually, I achieved my first earned secure attachment outside of therapy and was subsequently ready to let go of therapy as the only place where I could have deep and meaningful connection.

I believe the need to have mothering- and fathering-type support from others is a lifelong need and not just limited to childhood. Fortunately I am now blessed many years later to experience a multileveled form of reparenting by others which I call reparenting by committee. I conceptualize reparenting by committee as a circle of friends that has varying layers and levels of intimacy. The inner circle of my reparenting committee includes my five closest friends.

I think of this inner circle as friends with whom nothing is too vulnerable or taboo to talk about. My wife, a therapist friend, my exercise buddy and two members of a long term men’s group that I was in are in this circle. This circle also has an outer layer of people who would be inner if circumstances allowed me to see them more.

Outside this orb are levels of succeeding less intimate, yet still meaningful circles of relationship. The next circle out is intimates who I rarely see anymore but who have shared enough intimacy with me in the past that I now draw comfort from imagining them caring for me in the present. My deceased grandmother is in this circle as are three of my former therapists, a couple of army buddies, old high school and college friends, and my four best friends from the ten years I lived in Australia.

The next circle out from this consists of my nurse practitioner, the body worker I occasionally see, some therapist colleagues and the wise old school librarian who helps me pick books for my son to read.

The next circle out from this are friends I play sports with, parents of my son’s friends and people in my neighborhood with whom my contact is not especially vulnerable, but with whom there is an easy chemistry that adds to my general overall sense of belonging.

And the final circle is occasional strangers, who from time to time, I am graced to have easy and comforting interactions with.

I also know various survivors whose effective recovery practices have similarly rewarded them with enough portions of love from a variety of others that their childhood starvation for help and support is significantly assuaged. And like me, their committees, started with the first person they had good enough intimacy with. Counting yourself, this then is a committee of two, which with grace can then build slowly, one friendship at a time.

The Tao Of Self-Relating And Relating To Others

Recovering is therefore enhanced on every level by safe human help. Once again however, survivors with especially harsh betrayal histories may need to do a great deal of work on other levels before they are ready to risk the vulnerability of opening to relational help.

Nonetheless, deep level recovering, as well as healthy “human-being” is typically a vacillating blend of self-help and help from others. Relational work helps heal the initial wound of family abandonment, and self work decreases the self-abandonment that occurs because the child was forced to imitate his parents’ abandonment of him. The more time you practice the various techniques of self-care described throughout this book, the less time you spend in self-abandonment. With enough persistence, self-care becomes an invaluable, irreplaceable habit.

In advanced recovery, self-help and relational-help blend in an all important Tao. A Tao is a yin/yang combination of opposite and complementary forces. The Tao of relational recovery involves balancing healthy independence with healthy dependence on others.

For the survivor, this therapeutic synthesis can come into being when an improved supportive relationship with yourself allows you to choose and open to a helpful relationship. Sometimes simultaneously, the attainment of a safe, supportive relationship with another person promotes the growth of your ability to be self-supportive. This then rewards you with a decrease in your automatic tendency toward self-abandonment. Complementarily, this then fosters the gradual development of community – the vital life resource that you were so unfairly deprived of in childhood.

The more self-supportive we become the more we attract supportive others. The more we are supported by others, the more we can support ourselves. Sometimes we get initiated into this dynamic Tao by our own efforts - sometimes by the grace of finding a supportive friend or professional helper.

For many of us survivors a considerable amount of self-help work has to take place before we are able to open to relational support – before we become discerning enough to choose truly safe and helpful support.