Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

Effective recovery work leads to an ongoing reduction of emotional flashbacks. Over time, with enough practice, you become more proficient at managing triggered states. This in turn results in flashbacks occurring less often, less intensely and less enduringly.

Another key sign of recovering is that your critic begins to shrink and lose its dominance over your psyche. As it shrinks, your user-friendly ego has room to grow and to develop the kind of mindfulness that recognizes when the critic has taken over. This in turn allows you to progressively reject the critic’s perfectionistic and drasticizing processes. More and more, you stop persecuting yourself for normal foibles. Additionally, you perseverate less in disappointment about other people’s minor miscues.

A further sign of recovering is a gradual increase in your ability to relax. With this comes an increasing ability to resist overreacting from a triggered position. This further allows you to use your fight, flight, freeze and fawn instincts in healthy and non-self-destructive ways. This means you only fight back when under real attack, only flee when odds are insurmountable, only freeze when you need to go into acute observation mode, and only fawn when it is appropriate to be self-sacrificing.

An alternative way of describing this decrease in overreacting is that you have a good balance between the polar opposites of fight and fawn. As this becomes increasingly realized, you vacillate healthily between asserting your own needs and compromising with the needs of others.

A further example of decreased reactivity is seen in a more balanced movement between the polar opposites of flight and freeze. This manifests as an improving equilibrium between doing and being, between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system arousal, and between left and right-brain processing. The importance of balancing the fight-fawn and flight-freeze polarities within yourself is explored in greater detail at the end of chapter 6.

Deep-level recovery is also evidenced by you becoming gradually more relaxed in safe enough company. This in turn leads to an increasing capacity to be more authentic and vulnerable in trustworthy relationships. With enough grace, this may then culminate in you acquiring an intimate, mutually supportive relationship where each of you can be there for the other through thick and thin.

Advanced recovery also correlates with letting go of the salvation fantasy that you will never have another flashback. Giving up the salvation fantasy is another one of those two steps forward, one step backward processes. We typically have to wrestle with denial a great deal to increasingly accept the unfair reality that we will never be totally flashback-free. Unless we do however, we impair our ability to easily recognize and quickly respond to flashbacks from a position of self-compassion, self-soothing and self-protection.

Although we often work on many levels of recovering at the same time, recovering is to some degree progressive. It begins on the cognitive level when psychoeducation and mindfulness helps us understand that we have Cptsd. This awakening then allows us to learn how to approach the journey of deconstructing the various life-spoiling dynamics of Cptsd.

Still on the cognitive level, we take our next steps into the long work of shrinking the critic. Some survivors will need to do a great deal of work on this level before they can move down to the emotional layer of work which is learning how to grieve effectively.

The phase of intensely grieving our childhood losses can last for a couple of years. When sufficient progress is made in grieving, the survivor naturally drops down into the next level of recovery work. This involves working through fear by grieving our loss of safety in the world. At this level, we also learn to work through our toxic shame by grieving the loss of our self-esteem.

As we become more adept in this type of deep level grieving, we are then ready to address the core issue of our trauma – the abandonment depression itself. Work here involves releasing the armoring and physiological reactivity in our body to the abandonment depression via the somatic work discussed in chapter 12. This work culminates with learning to compassionately support ourselves through our experiences of depression.

Finally, as we will learn more about in chapter 13, many survivors need some relational help in achieving the complex tasks involved in deconstructing each layer of our old pain-exacerbating defenses.

As stated earlier, recovery from Cptsd is complex. Sometimes, it can feel so hopelessly complex that we totally give up and get stuck in inertia for considerable lengths of time. This is why it is so important to understand that recovery is gradual and frequently a backwards and forwards process.

Effective recovery is often limited to only progressing in one or two areas at a time. Biting off more than we can chew and trying to accomplish too much too soon is often counterproductive. As a flight type, I spent years in mid-range recovery workaholically spinning my wheels trying to fix and change everything at once. I describe this at greater length in the “When Recovery becomes Obsessive-Compulsive” section of my first book [p140-141].

We often need to simplify our self-help efforts in early recovery. Accordingly, I recommend making shrinking the critic [chapter 9] your “go to” response if you feel unsure of how to proceed.

Once the critic is reduced enough that you can notice increasing periods of your brain being user-friendly, impulses to help and care for yourself naturally begin to arise. As this happens it becomes easier to tell whether you are guiding yourself with love or a whip. When you realize it’s the whip, please try to disarm your critic and treat yourself with the kindness you would extend to any young child who is struggling and having a hard time.

Nowhere is patience with ourselves more important than with the inner critic work. Typically the inner critic is too omnipresent to confront on every occasion. To do so would often leave no time for anything else.

But when we practice critic-shrinking in a gradually increasing way over time, we can more consistently disidentify from its negative focus and switch to a more self-supportive perspective. Eventually a new positive habit of rescuing ourselves from shame and self-hate takes on its own life. I still have my unfair share of flashbacks, but rarely do I ever side with my toxic critic.

Any self-help practices that we are trying to make second nature often work in this way. When we practice enough, self-help starts to become a matter of common sense. It reverberates as right action and gradually takes on its own life as we attune to the true nature of our spirits and souls which are inherently self-supportive.

We also aid our recovery greatly by challenging the all-or-none thinking of the critic whenever it judges us for not being perfect in our efforts. “Progress not perfection” is a powerful mantra for guiding our self-help recovery efforts.

Moreover as recovering progresses, and especially as the critic shrinks, the desire to help yourself- to care for yourself - becomes more spontaneous. This is especially true when we mindfully do things for ourselves in a spirit of loving-kindness. As such, we can do it for the child we were – the child who was deprived through no fault of her own. And, we can do it because we believe every child, without exception, deserves loving care.

Finally, if the reader is like I was in the past and has no overall perspective on his suffering, he may feel like he is spinning his wheels on one icy patch of road after another. I had decades of trying everything under the sun with what felt like a deepening sense of futility and defectiveness. Gratefully, I eventually reached an invisible critical mass, and realized I had actually come a long way. I had acquired quite a few pieces in this puzzle of recovery, and only needed to organize them into a map to move along further. As such, I have designed a ground plan that has helped me, my clients and website respondents to make sense of their suffering and to see how to effectively reduce it. I hope and pray that the cartography in this book will also offer you relief.

Recovery involves learning to handle unpredictable shifts in our inner emotional weather.

Perhaps the ultimate dimension of this is what I call the Surviving

Thriving continuum.

Before we enter into recovery, it may feel like life is nothing but a struggle to survive. However, when recovery progresses enough, we begin to have some experiences of feeling like we are thriving. These may start out as feelings of optimism, hopefulness and certainty that we are indeed recovering.

And then, the bottom inevitably drops out because recovery is never all forward progress. Oh so unfairly, we are back to feeling that we can barely survive. To make matters worse, we are amnesiac that we even had a respite from surviving. Another flashback has hit and we polarize back onto the surviving end of the continuum. We are stuck in the anxious and deadened feelings of the abandonment mélange.

In survival mode, even the most trivial and normally easy task can feel excruciatingly difficult. As in childhood, it is all feels just too hard. And if the flashback is especially intense, Thanatos may start knocking down the door. Thanatos is the death urge described by Freud and in a flashback it corresponds with the suicidal ideation we looked at in chapter 1.

Once again, it is important to repeat that this feeling-state is a flashback to the worst times in childhood when our will to live was so compromised. As mindfulness improves we can recognize suicidal ideation as evidence of a flashback and begin to rescue ourselves with the chapter 8 flashback management steps.

As recovery progresses, polarizations back into survival mode do not take us to the utter despair end of the continuum so often. Nonetheless survival mode can still feel pretty awful, especially when it is characterized by high anxiety or immobilizing depression.

Being in survival is especially difficult during those times when flashback management is less effective, and feelings that life is a struggle can hang on for days and even weeks. This is the territory where flashbacks morph into extended regressions.

I believe regressions are sometimes a call from our psyche to address important developmental arrests. In this case, it is the need to learn unrelenting self-acceptance during a period of extended difficulty. It is also the need to develop a staunch and unyielding sense of self-protection. This fundamental instinct of fiery willingness to defend ourselves from unfairness needs to strengthen progressively so that we can withstand inner critic attacks.

Moreover we can grow in our ability to survive “survival” by using the chapter 13 mindfulness techniques to practice and build enduring self-compassion. Moreover, if we are far enough along in recovery to have a safe ally, we can enlist their support to help us verbally ventilate out our pain at being stuck in survival.

Temptations can be great at such times to revert to the less functional ways of self-soothing that we learned when we younger. Depending on your 4F type this commonly manifests as increased eating, substance abuse, working, sleeping and/or sexually acting out.

Sometimes we are triggered into self-medicating in this way because we are desperately trying to keep ourselves on the thriving end of the continuum. Desperately clinging to thriving is a hard impulse to resist, even when we are in reality way past its expiration date.

Yet as recovery and mindfulness increase we begin to notice that this type of self-medicating indicates that we are in a survival-flashback. We are no longer authentically on the thriving end of the continuum. We have compounded our regression, by regressing further - by self-medicating to unnaturally prolong a preferred experience. At such times, we benefit most by reinvoking our intention to practice self-acceptance – by recommitting to being there for ourselves no matter where we are on the continuum.

As bears repeating, all human beings are existentially challenged to handle disappointing shifts out of thriving into surviving. We survivors however have greater difficulties handling these transitions because we were abandoned for so long at the surviving end of the continuum. Yet as our recovery progresses, we can learn to become increasingly self-supportive in times of being stuck in survival.

Some readers may work on their recovery for a long time, and erroneously and shamefully feel they are not making any progress. Because of the all-or-none thinking that typically accompanies Cptsd, survivors in the early stages of recovery often fail to notice or validate their own actual progress.

If we do not notice the degrees of our own improvement in our recovery work, we are in great danger of giving up on recovering. Because of black-and-white thinking, we can regularly fall into the trap of not acknowledging and valuing what we are actually accomplishing. Perfectionistic dismissal of improvement that is not 100% is common in early recovery.

Here are some common areas where I see that recovering survivors fail to notice and self-validate their progressive degrees of improvement.

Less intense launching into a 4F response
Increasing resistance to the critic
Increased Mindfulness about flashbacks or inner critic attacks
Increased time feeling good enough about yourself
Progress in meeting arrested developments listed in chapter 2
Decreased overeating or use of self-medicating substances
Increased experiences of good enough relating with others
Decrease in the painfulness and intensity of flashback feelings

In terms of number 3 above, it is important to note that even when mindfulness does not immediately terminate a flashback or critic attack, noticing and identifying these Cptsd phenomena is more progressive than just being blindly lost in them. Moreover, ongoing recognition makes effective ameliorative action more accessible. It makes us increasingly likely to remember to use the flashback management steps listed in chapter 8.

Furthermore, it is important that we notice the gradually decreasing intensity of the flashback feelings of anxiety, shame and depression. In this regard, social anxiety can gradually reduce along a continuum that stretches from panicky withdrawal... to a more tolerable social discomfort... to periods of social ease. Additionally, depression can gradually diminish along a continuum that stretches from paralyzing despair... to anhedonia – an inability to enjoy normal life pleasures... to a state of tired, and relatively unmotivated peacefulness. Of course both these processes typically improve at a vacillating, back-and-forth rate.

As I write this I feel some old sadness about the many decades that I judged my emotional tone and mood as either good or bad in a very all-or-nothing way. If I was not feeling very good than I felt as if everything was really bad. And since feeling very good is something most human beings only get to experience a relatively small proportion of the time, my perception of feeling bad became a much more dominant experience than was necessary. In fact, mildly unpleasant feeling typically morphed me quickly into feeling terrible via shame-tinged, all-or-none thinking.

I am so grateful for the life-changing epiphany that lead me to trade in my old primary aspiration of “Celebration” for my new one of “Serenity.”

Inner critic thought processes refute signs of progress whenever a new flashback occurs, no matter how much less intense it is than before. Every recurrence of feeling shame, fear or depression is interpreted as proof that nothing has changed, even when there are increasing periods of not being triggered.

The critic’s black-and-white assessment is: “Either I’m cured or I’m still hopelessly defective.” And once you identify with your critic’s pronouncement of defectiveness, you are off and spiraling downward into a full-fledged flashback - captured once again in the ice veneer of toxic shame that freezes one in the Cptsd stranglehold of helplessness and hopelessness.

It is exceedingly difficult to accept the proposition – the fact – that recovery is never complete. And although we can expect our flashbacks to markedly decrease over time, it is tremendously difficult, and sometimes impossible, to let go of the salvation fantasy that we will one day be forever free of them.

Yet when we do not loosen our grip on the salvation fantasy, we remain extremely susceptible to blaming ourselves every time we have a flashback. Understanding this is so crucial because recovery typically progresses in a process that has many temporary regressions. Moreover, most recoverees often have the unfortunate subjective experience that the temporary regression feels as permanent as concrete. This is especially true because of the interminability feeling of flashbacks. When we flashback, we regress to our child-mind which was incapable of imagining a future any different than the everlasting present of being so abandoned.

So how can we come to bear the knowledge that our awful childhoods have created some permanent damage? It helps me to see my Cptsd as somewhat analogous to diabetes, i.e., a condition that will need management throughout my life. This is a piece of bad news that naturally feels offensively unpalatable, but the good news, as with diabetes, is that as we become more skilled at flashback management, Cptsd can gradually become infrequently bothersome. And even more importantly, we can evolve towards leading increasingly rich and rewarding lives.

Even better news is that Cptsd, when efficiently managed, eventually bestows gifts. It comes with significant silver linings - unavailable to those less traumatized - as we will see at the end of the chapter.

Healing from childhood trauma is also a long gradual process because recovering your full self-expression requires a great deal of practice. Being yourself can be intimidating and flashback-inducing. Healthy self-assertion was punished like a capital crime in many dysfunctional families. Expressing yourself in ways that your parents forbade typically triggers intense flashbacks at first. This can cause you to lose sight of how this practice gradually reduces the chronic pain of remaining invisible.

We can encourage ourselves to face these growing pains by conceptualizing them as therapeutic flashbacks. We then choose to weather these flashbacks to stop the past from holding us back, to reclaim the fundamental human rights that our parents denied us, and to finally own what is rightfully ours for the taking.

We can further bolster ourselves for such necessary flashbacks by comparing “speaking up” to going to the dentist for a toothache. Unless we accept the acute pain of the dentist’s therapeutic procedure, we will suffer chronic dental discomfit indefinitely. Unless we speak up, the loneliness of our silence will imprison us forever.

Recovering from overwhelmingly painful childhoods is also so difficult because we understandably want to avoid any further pain at all. We may even believe that we need to risk a flashback and practice speaking up. But at the moment of facing the triggering that silence can so easily avoid, we cannot sometimes help giving up and remaining mute.

However, if we are ever to recover our real voice, we must sometimes invoke the energy of bravery. Bravery is, in my opinion, defined by fear. It is taking right action despite being afraid. It is not brave to do things that are not scary.

The anger work described in chapter 11 can help you with this enormously. With a strong enough intention you can begin by occasionally invoking the kind of courage that involves feeling the fear and doing it anyway. You can nudge yourself to do it to rescue your inner child from the loneliness of never being seen or heard.

Moreover, when we embrace this practice we will eventually learn that fear does not have to disabling. We can be afraid and still act powerfully. We can refuse to tolerate never speaking up, never having our say, never stating a preference, and never saying “no” to set a boundary.

With enough practice, therapeutic flashbacks not only diminish, but begin to be replaced by a healthy sense of pride in ourselves for our courageous self-championing. More and more we are rewarded with feelings of safe belonging in the world.

It is crucial for deeper level recovery that we learn that feelings of fear, shame and guilt are sometimes signs that we have said or done the right thing. They are emotional flashbacks to how we were traumatized for trying to claim normal human privileges.

As our recovery progresses, we need to learn to endure these feelings. Reinterpreting the deeper meaning of these feelings is key to accomplishing this. Typically this involves epiphanies like the following. “I feel afraid now, but I am not in danger like I was as a child.” “I feel guilty not because I am guilty, but because I was intimidated into feeling guilty for expressing my opinions, my needs and my preferences.” “I feel shame because my parents rained disgust on me for being me. I say no to these toxic parental curses, and I am proud and right to see how they tried to murder my soul. I give them their shame back as disgust – the disgust any healthy adult feels when he sees a parent bullying a child with contempt, or when he sees a parent heartlessly ignoring a suffering child.”

The quest to ongoingly grow and evolve out of my childhood trauma sometimes becomes more embraceable to me when I remember the poet’s words: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” In fact, some of the latest research in neuroscience suggests that we actually need a modicum of stress in our life. This type of stress is called optimal stress.

Optimal stress is the balanced, moderate amount of stress that appears to be necessary to grow the new neurons and neuronal connections that correlate with keeping the brain healthy. Research shows that just as too much stress creates a biochemical condition that damages neurons in the brain, too little stress leads to the atrophy, death and lack of replacement of old neurons. This is why lifelong learning is widely recognized as one of the key practices necessary to avoid Alzheimer’s disease.

In my opinion, lifelong recovering is an exalted subset of lifelong learning. I believe that optimal stress is frequently attained when we practice the behaviors that remedy our developmental arrests. Examples of this include reading self-help books, attending self-improvement workshops, working at deeper self-discovery through journaling, or struggling to be more vulnerable and authentic in a therapy session or an evolving relationship. Moreover, it might be that minor flashbacks sometimes function as optimal stress. I certainly know a number of long term recoverees who seem to be evolving and becoming sharper in their old age.

We live in an emotionally impoverished culture, and those who stick with a long term recovery process are often rewarded with emotional intelligence far beyond the norm. This is somewhat paradoxical, as survivors of childhood trauma are initially injured more grievously in their emotional natures than those in the general population.

The silver lining in this, however, is that many of us were forced to consciously address our suffering because our wounding was so much more severe. Those who work an effective recovery program not only recover significantly from emotional damage, but also evolve out of the emotional impoverishment of the general society. One of my clients described this as becoming “way more emotionally intelligent than the ‘normies’.”

Perhaps the greatest reward of improved emotional intelligence is seen in a greater capacity for deeper intimacy. Emotional intelligence is a foundational ingredient of relational intelligence – a type of intelligence that is also frequently diminished in the general populace.

As stated earlier, intimacy is greatly enhanced when two people dialogue about all aspects of their experience. This is especially true when they transcend taboos against full emotional communication. Feelings of love, appreciation and gratitude are naturally enhanced when we reciprocally show our full selves - confident or afraid, loving or alienated, proud or embarrassed. What an incredible achievement it is when any two of us create such an authentic and supportive relationship! Many of the most intimate relationships that I have seen are between people who have done a great deal of freeing themselves from the negative legacies of their upbringings.

A further silver lining in recovery is the attainment of a much richer internal life. The introspective process, so fundamental to effective recovery work, eventually deepens and enriches survivors’ psyches. Ongoing mindful exploration of all aspects of our experience helps us see firsthand what Socrates meant when he said: “The unexamined life is not worth living”.

The survivor who follows the introspective “road less travelled” becomes increasingly free of compulsive and unconscious allegiance to unhelpful familial, religious and societal values that were instilled at an impressionable age.

The recoveree now gets to choose her own values and reject those that are not in her own best interest. She develops a deeper more grounded self-respect that is not contingent upon going with the herd and shifting center with every new popular trend. In psychological parlance, she becomes free and brave enough to individuate and develop more of her full potential.

In Joseph Campbell’s words, the survivor learns to “follows his own bliss”. He is freer to pursue activities and interests that naturally appeal to him. He evolves into his own sense of style. He may even feel emboldened to coif and dress himself without adherence to the standards of fashion. He may extend this freedom into his home décor. In this vein, I have seen many survivors discover their own aesthetic, as well as an increased appreciation of beauty in general. How this contrasts with many of the homes of my “normal” sports-buddies, whose homes are often sparsely decorated, as if they are too afraid to put something out or up lest it not be cool enough.

As the survivor recovers the right of free choice, she becomes more open to trying new things – healthy things that mainstream society might consider uncool or even taboo. Here are some examples of this that I believe are conducive to both recovery and healthy everyday living: voluntary simplicity, improved diet, meditation, alternative medicine, broad scale compassion, environmentalism, deeper emotional communication and a broader use of the grieving process.

The survivor who pursues long-term development on his journey of recovering generally achieves greater overall evolution than the average citizen. For many untraumatized people, the pursuit of ongoing learning often stops after their last formal learning experience – whether that is high school or college.

Introspective development also rewards the recoveree with more perspective and wisdom in making important life choices. It also improves his everyday instinctual choices, such as whether to fight, flee, freeze or fawn in times of real danger.

Finally, another silver lining, often achieved in later stage recovery, is a greater ability to handle normal pain in the most healthy and least retraumatizing way. By normal pain, I mean the recurring existential pain all human beings experience from time to time via encounters with loss, illness, money troubles, time pressures, etc. Such painful encounters can produce emotional reactions like anger, sadness, fear and depression. The average person has not learned how to verbally ventilate and metabolize their feelings about such events. This results in them getting stuck in painful emotional places, especially depression, for inordinate amounts of time.

One reason that recovering survivors attain greater emotional intelligence is that they eventually see through the mainstream media’s indoctrination that people should be happy all the time.

Much of the general populace, however, becomes increasingly dissociated from their full emotional experience by anxiously pushing to pump up their mood. Many “normal” people strive to fulfill the pursuit of happiness as if it were a patriotic duty. More and more they employ socially acceptable addictions to accomplish this. Snacking, spending, self-medicating, and online puttering are widespread addictions that seem to be ever on the rise.

A particularly rampant example of unhealthy mood-altering behavior is porn addiction. Addiction to pornography creates a terrible narrowing of consciousness in the many men who are afflicted with it. It commonly destroys their capacity for real intimacy. Tragically, the use of porn is more and more “normalized”, even in many psychological circles.

As we become more emotionally intelligent, we free ourselves from the hysteria-inducing pressure to continuously pump up the joy in our life.

Please do not read this as an “Ode against Joy”. It is a blessing to have our natural fair share of laughter and feeling good. But I believe it also a blessing to resist the growing emotional imperialism that demands we become fountains of joy. We are assaulted daily with messages from advertisements, from laugh track-saturated TV shows, and from new age enlightenment gurus who shame us into believing that we are “less than”, if we are not constantly bubbling over with ecstatic Disneyland-like enthusiasm.

The pressure to be always up was an enormous shame trigger for me for decades. Sadly, I increasingly see clients and friends struggling with self-contempt for not being happy enough.

Once again, I am certainly not knocking joy, but when it is inauthentic, it is disconcertingly sad and sometimes alienating. In worst case scenarios, a controlling narcissist can emotionally blackmail us to join him in falsely emoting joy. Just as painful is when we codependents force ourselves to laugh to cover up our fear or shame.

This is also not to say that authentic joy cannot be contagious. Contagious joy is the wonderful experience of being positively triggered into vicariously sharing someone else’s authentic delight. [For an experience of this, go to www.youtube.com and search for “Quadruplets Laughing”].

In my experience, it seems that authentic joy is much more common in the lives of well parented children. I also do not think that joy is typically as dominant an emotional theme in adult life unless it is synthetically induced with drugs or alcohol. On the other hand, experiences of joy for survivors can gradually become more frequent as a person’s recovery efforts promote increasing feelings of safety in the world.

As our emotional intelligence increases, I see considerable evidence that our expectations of joy become more reasonable. This allows us to let go of permanent happiness as the unrealistic goal of recovery. Until this happens, we remain at the mercy of the critic’s contemptuous diatribes that we are not being joyful enough. One of my clients recently became mindful enough to see how he was shaming himself for not being as jubilant as those in the beer commercials.

As a concluding comment to this overview, it is important to emphasize that, like most things in life, there are degrees of Cptsd. The continuum of Cptsd ranges from mild neurosis to psychosis, and from highly functioning to non-functioning. Its severity ranges from having extended periods without flashbacks to being in full flashback horror much of the time. This range also varies from a condition of increased experiences of thriving to a condition of barely surviving disability.

Progress in recovery is seen, then, in flashbacks becoming more manageable and life satisfaction becoming continuously more frequent. A friend of mine once joked with me: “I’ve got so much recovery, I’m beyond normal – I’m supernormal. I make the normies look like they’re the ones with Cptsd.”

As we end the overview, we are ready to move to the next chapter, which explains how varying childhood trauma histories can cause Cptsd. Here we will also see how verbal and emotional abuse alone can cause Cptsd, and how profound emotional abandonment is typically at the core of most Cptsd.