SHRINKING THE INNER CRITIC

This chapter explores what one of my clients calls the “nasty and sneaky tricks of the critic.”

ORIGIN OF THE CPTSD CRITIC

A flashback-inducing critic is typically spawned in a danger-ridden childhood home. This is true whether the danger comes from the passive abandonment of neglect or the active abandonment of abuse. When parents do not provide safe enough bonding and positive feedback, the child flounders in anxiety and fear. Many children appear to be hard-wired to adapt to this endangering abandonment with perfectionism.

A prevailing climate of danger forces the child’s superego to over-cultivate the various programs of perfectionism and endangerment listed below. Once again, the superego is the part of the psyche that learns parental rules in order to gain their acceptance.

The inner critic is the superego gone bad. The inner critic is the superego in overdrive desperately trying to win your parents’ approval. When perfectionist striving fails to win welcoming from your parents, the inner critic becomes increasingly hostile and caustic. It festers into a virulent inner voice that increasingly manifests self-hate, self-disgust and self-abandonment. The inner critic blames you incessantly for shortcomings that it imagines to be the cause of your parents’ rejection. It is incapable of understanding that the real cause lies in your parents’ shortcomings.

As a traumatized child, your over-aroused sympathetic nervous system also drives you to become increasingly hypervigilant. Hypervigilance is a fixation on looking for danger that comes from excessive exposure to real danger. In an effort to recognize, predict and avoid danger, hypervigilance is ingrained in your approach to being in the world. Hypervigilance narrows your attention into an incessant, on-guard scanning of the people around you. It also frequently projects you into the future, imagining danger in upcoming social events. Moreover, hypervigilance typically devolves into intense performance anxiety on every level of self-expression.

Like the soldier overlong in combat, ptsd sets in because you feel as if you are constantly under attack. Unfortunately, internal attack is now added to external attack, and you become locked into hypervigilance and sympathetic nervous system arousal.

A traumatized child becomes desperate to relieve the anxiety and depression of abandonment. The critic-driven child can only think about the ways she is too much or not enough. The child’s unfolding sense of self [the healthy ego], finds no room to develop. Her identity virtually becomes the critic. The superego trumps the ego.

In this process, the critic becomes increasingly virulent and eventually switches from the parents’ internalized voice: “You’re a bad boy/girl” to the first person: “I’m a bad boy/girl.” Over time, self-goading increasingly deteriorates: “I’m such a loser. I’m so pathetic… bad... ugly…worthless…stupid...defective.”

This is unlike the soldier in combat who does not develop a toxic critic. This process whereby the superego becomes carcinogenic is a key juncture where ptsd morphs into Cptsd. The cruel, totalitarian inner critic is a key distinguishing feature of Cptsd.

One of my clients grief-fully remembered the constant refrains of his childhood: “If only I wasn’t so needy and selfish…if only my freckles would fade...if only I could pitch a perfect game...if only I could stop gagging on the canned peas during dinner...if only I could pray all the time to get mom’s arthritis cured, then maybe she’d stop picking on me, and then maybe dad would play catch with me.”

In my work with survivors, I am continuously struck by how often the inner critic triggers them into overwhelming emotional flashbacks. The Cptsd-derived inner critic weds our fear of abandonment to our self-hate about our imperfections. It then tortures us with the entwined serpents of perfectionism and endangerment. Endangerment is the process of constantly projecting danger onto safe enough situations.

Your recovering depends on learning how to recognize and confront the 14 inner critic attacks listed below. When this process of recovering is bypassed, these deeply engrained programs continue to send you tumbling back into the overwhelming fear, shame and hopelessness of your childhood abandonment.

14 COMMON INNER CRITIC ATTACKS

[Each attack/program is paired with a therapeutic thought-correction response]

Perfectionism Attacks

1. Perfectionism. My perfectionism arose as an attempt to gain safety and support in my dangerous family. Perfection is a self-persecutory myth. I do not have to be perfect to be safe or loved in the present. I am letting go of relationships that require perfection. I have a right to make mistakes. Mistakes do not make me a mistake. Every mistake or mishap is an opportunity to practice loving myself in the places I have never been loved.

2. All-or-None & Black-and-White Thinking. I reject extreme or over-generalized descriptions, judgments or criticisms. One negative happenstance does not mean I am stuck in a never-ending pattern of defeat. Statements that describe me as “always” or “never” this or that, are typically grossly inaccurate.

3. Self-Hate, Self-Disgust & Toxic Shame. I commit to myself. I am on my side. I am a good enough person. I refuse to trash myself. I turn shame back into blame and disgust, and externalize it to anyone who shames my normal feelings and foibles. As long as I am not hurting anyone, I refuse to be shamed for normal emotional responses like anger, sadness, fear and depression. I especially refuse to attack myself for how hard it is to completely eliminate the self-hate habit.

4. Micromanagement/Worrying/Obsessing/Looping/Over-Futurizing. I will not repetitively examine details over and over. I will not jump to negative conclusions. I will not endlessly second-guess myself. I cannot change the past. I forgive all my past mistakes. I cannot make the future perfectly safe. I will stop hunting for what could go wrong. I will not try to control the uncontrollable. I will not micromanage myself or others. I work in a way that is “good enough”, and I accept the existential fact that my efforts sometimes bring desired results and sometimes they do not. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” - The Serenity Prayer

5. Unfair/Devaluing Comparisons to others or to your most perfect moments. I refuse to compare myself unfavorably to others. I will not compare “my insides to their outsides”. I will not judge myself for not being at peak performance all the time. In a society that pressures us into acting happy all the time, I will not get down on myself for feeling bad.

6. Guilt. Feeling guilty does not mean I am guilty. I refuse to make my decisions and choices from guilt. Sometimes I need to feel the guilt and do it anyway. In the inevitable instances when I inadvertently hurt someone, I will apologize, make amends, and let go of my guilt. I will not apologize over and over. I am no longer a victim. I will not accept unfair blame. Guilt is sometimes camouflaged fear: “I feel guilty and afraid, but I am not guilty or in danger.”

7. “Shoulding”. I will substitute the words “want to” for “should” and only follow this imperative if it feels like I want to, unless I am under legal, ethical or moral obligation.

8. Over-productivity/Workaholism/Busyholism. I am a human being not a human doing. I will not choose to be perpetually productive. I am more productive in the long run, when I balance work with play and relaxation. I will not try to perform at 100% all the time. I subscribe to the normalcy of vacillating along a continuum of efficiency.

9. Harsh Judgments of Self & Others/ Name-Calling. I will not let the bullies and critics of my early life win by joining and agreeing with them. I refuse to attack myself or abuse others. I will not displace the criticism and blame that rightfully belongs to my dysfunctional caretakers onto myself or current people in my life. “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself”. - Jane Eyre

Endangerment Attacks

10. Drasticizing/Catastrophizing/Hypochondriasizing. I feel afraid but I am not in danger. I am not “in trouble” with my parents. I will not blow things out of proportion. I refuse to scare myself with thoughts and pictures of my life deteriorating. No more home-made horror movies and disaster flicks. I will not turn every ache and pain into a story about my imminent demise. I am safe and at peace.

11. Negative focus. I renounce over-noticing and dwelling on what might be wrong with me or life around me. I will not minimize or discount my attributes. Right now, I notice, visualize and enumerate my accomplishments, talents and qualities, as well as the many gifts that life offers me, e.g., nature, music, film, food, beauty, color, friends, pets, etc.

12. Time Urgency. I am not in danger. I do not need to rush. I will not hurry unless it is a true emergency. I am learning to enjoy doing my daily activities at a relaxed pace.

13. Disabling Performance Anxiety. I reduce procrastination by reminding myself that I will not accept unfair criticism or perfectionist expectations from anyone. Even when afraid, I will defend myself from unfair criticism. I won’t let fear make my decisions.

14. Perseverating About Being Attacked. Unless there are clear signs of danger, I will thought-stop my projection of past bullies/critics onto others. The vast majority of my fellow human beings are peaceful people. I have legal authorities to aid in my protection if threatened by the few who aren’t. I invoke thoughts and images of my friends’ love and support.

Critic attacks like most things are not all-or-none. They can vary in intensity and duration. Most of the case examples that follow are on the intense end of the spectrum. I chose them because they are more illustrative of how the critic operates. Once you become proficient at identifying intense critic attacks, you typically develop the mindfulness necessary to notice more subtle attacks. This is essential because most survivors spend tremendous amounts of time barely conscious of how incessantly self-critical they are.

As with the flashback management steps, memorizing these rebuttals to the critic and using them like mantras is especially helpful in critic shrinking.

Critic-initiated Flashbacks

The inner critic commonly increases the intensity of a flashback via a barrage of the attacks listed above. Flashbacks can devolve into increasingly painful levels of the abandonment depression. One attack can repetitively bleed into another and tumble us further down a spiral of hopelessness. It is awful enough to take a single punch in a fight, but when the punches keep coming, the victim is severely thrashed.

Once again, Cptsd flashbacks do not typically have a visual component. However, it is not unusual for a survivor to sometimes flash on a snapshot of a parent’s contemptuous face at the moment of triggering.

My client, Dmitri, began his session by telling me that he was contentedly puttering around his kitchen when he accidentally knocked over a glass of water. He immediately pictured his father and a loud internal voice blurted: “I’m such a world class spaz!”

Retrospectively, he realized that he then plummeted instantly into a flashback. Anxiety quickly overwhelmed him and he was soon lost in a tirade of self-attacking diatribes emanating from the critic. “Spaz” is an example of the name-calling that the critic specializes in. It is a combination of critic attacks # 1, 3 and 9 above.

The attacks soon deteriorated into a full scale laundry listing of all his imperfections. These were characteristically blown out of proportion, and often not reality based. The critic screamed: “I’m so clumsy. I never do anything right [#2 all-or-none thinking]. “I could f*ck up a free lunch!”

Quickly, Dmitri’s thinking was totally dominated by a negative focus[#11] that merged with drasticizing [#10], and culminated in attack fantasies [#14] that made him cancel his plans to go out.

This example is only a micro-portion of the unending onslaught that can accompany a major flashback. After enduring many, many more elaborations of this process, Dmitri became entrenched in the ultimate abandonment catastrophization [#10]: “No wonder I don’t have a partner or any friends; who could tolerate being around such a loser” [#2: He actually had two good friends].

Dmitri’s felt-sense of abandonment then morphed into self-abandonment. Primitive self-soothing behaviors reemerged as he self-medicated by binging on an enormous amount of junk food. He then retreated into his bedroom to dissociate further into a long morning nap.

All this in reaction to the tiny faux pas of a spilled glass of water!

I must emphasize here that Dmitri was not crazy or defective because his critic made a hell out of a spilled glass of water. All this was a re-visit via flashback to the real traumatic experiences of being profoundly rejected by his parents for trivial mistakes. His father had contemptuously told him he could f*ck up a free lunch innumerable times.

As Dmitri resolved and harvested the learning potential of this flashback, he said to me: “Pete, I can’t tell you how horrible they were. Life at home was one no-win, mind-f*ck situation after another. F*cked if I did, and f*cked if I didn’t. It’s no wonder I’ve been stuck all these years with this ball and chain code: ‘Don’t ever let down your guard!’ Something’s just moved in me and I swear I’m gonna start cutting myself some slack!”

Thoughts As Triggers

Rejecting parents typically make the child believe that his opinions and feelings are dangerous imperfections. In worst case scenarios the mere impulse to speak triggers fear and shame. How could anything the child says not reveal his stupidity and worthlessness? Opening his mouth invariably leads to deeper rejection and trouble.

As ongoing neglect and abuse repetitively strengthen the critic, even the most innocuous, self-interested thought or musing can trigger a five alarm fire of intense emotional flashback. To maintain the illusive hope of someday winning parental approval, the child’s perfectionistic striving escalates, and may become obsessive/compulsive. Even an imagined mistake can then initiate a flashback.

The Critic As The Shaming Internalized Parents

Not infrequently, a client comes into a session and shamefully confesses something that sounds like this: “I called myself a f*ckwit over and over last night. I must really be inherently messed up, because I know my mother never said that. As bad as she was, she never swore and I doubt she ever even heard that word.”

The explanation for this is that the critic is essentially a process. It is an ever developing process that co-opts our creativity and funnels it into “new and improved” ways of imitating our parents’ disparagement.

Parental contempt is the key piece of the emotional abuse that creates toxic shame. Toxic shame is the emotional matrix of the abandonment depression. It is also the glue that keeps us stuck helplessly in flashbacks. As such, toxic shame is the affect or emotional tone of the inner critic. Shame besmirches us as it emotionally intensifies each of the 14 assaults described above.

In main stream psychology, shame is often described as a social emotion. Normal shame is a somewhat healthy, self-regulating emotional reaction that arises when someone witnesses us acting in an unfair, offensive, or hurtful way.

This is not the case with toxic shame however. Many Cptsd survivors in recovery soon realize that they do not need a witness to suddenly be catapulted into a shame attack.

Dmitri was all alone when he knocked over the glass.

Or was he? There is an invisible social context to toxic shame attacks. Toxic shame is social because the inner critic came into existence through pathological interactions with our parents. Moreover, toxic shame is social in the moment of the solitary flashback, because at the time it is as if we are in the presence of our parents.

For me, the strongest evidence of this occurs when I am on my own and trying to do something difficult. If I make a mistake or do not accomplish my task as efficiently as possible, I often feel very anxious as if I am being watched and criticized.

I believe this phenomenon corresponds with an internalization of our parents. Our parents were such formative and formidable presences in our developing life, that we have strong representations of them in our psyches. These representations include their beliefs and condemnation about us. Until we work on shrinking their influence, our internalized parents exist in our psyches as the key controlling force of our lives.

Facing The Stubbornness Of The Critic

The work of shrinking the critic is one of the most essential processes of recovery. As obvious as its value may seem as you read this, embracing the task of renouncing the critic is much more challenging than it may seem at first blush.

The critic’s programs are not only burned deeply into our psyches by our parents, but we also unknowingly emblazon them into our minds by mimicking our parents. We are now the key reinforcing agents of their toxic legacy. With little mindfulness of it, we injure ourselves with countless angry, self-disgusted repetitions of their judgments. Recovery now depends on you withdrawing your blind allegiance to this terrible process of only noticing yourself negatively.

The task of diminishing these self-negating patterns is daunting. It is typically lifetime work – often negotiable only at the rate of two-steps-forward, one-step backward. And oh how unfair it is that the step backward often feels more like six!

Yet recent findings in neuroscience [The General Theory of Love; The Talking Cure] have shown that biologically ingrained mental patterns can be diminished and replaced with new ones through long term repetitive work. I believe this is analogous to adding or subtracting girth to parts of your physique, which typically takes seemingly innumerable repetitions of a given exercise.

In the last couple of decades my brain has gone from being my own worst enemy almost all the time to being very reliably on my side. I have also seen similar gains with many of the clients I have worked with long-term.

Perfectionism And Emotional Neglect

As stated earlier, perfectionism also seems to be an instinctual defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential impossibility of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until lack of success forces her to retreat into a dissociative freeze response or an anti-social fight response.

Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. Striving to be perfect offers her a semblance of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence.

As the quest for perfection fails over and over, and as parental acceptance and nurturing remain elusive, imperfection becomes synonymous with shame and fear. Perceived imperfection triggers fear of abandonment, which triggers self-hate for imperfection, which expands abandonment into self-abandonment. This in turn amps fear up even further, which in turn intensifies self-disgust, etc. On and on it goes in a downward spiral of fear and shame-encrusted depression. It can go on for hours, days, weeks, and for those with severe Cptsd, can become their standard mode of being.

More On Endangerment

The importance and magnitude of the critic’s endangerment programs cannot be overstated. I have worked with numerous “well-therapized” people who were relatively free from perfectionism, but still seriously afflicted with the critic’s addiction to noticing potential danger. Said another way, I have seen survivors eliminate much of their perfectionist, self-attacking thinking without realizing that the critic was still flooding their minds with fear-inducing thoughts and images.

I learned to disidentify from perfectionism long before I learned to stop perseverating on my critic’s harrowing snapshots of danger. In fact, I became quite adept at morphing these snapshots into feature long films about my imminent demise.

Permanent abandonment, public humiliation, lethal illness, lonely death, imminent attack, and penniless homelessness are common endangerment themes of many survivors. One of my clients identified his inner critic endangerment process as: “My critic, the horror movie producer”. This made me think: “My critic the terrorist”.

If I had to describe the two most key processes of the critic, I would say this. First, the critic is above all a self-perpetuating process of extreme negative noticing. Second the critic is a constant hypervigilance that sees disaster hovering in the next moment about to launch into a full-court-press.

Using Anger To Thought-Stop The Critic

Thought-stopping is the process of using willpower to disidentify from and interrupt toxic thoughts and visualizations. Sometimes visualizing a stop sign at the same time can help strengthen thought-stopping.

Since traumatizing parents cripple the instinctive fight response of their child, recovering the anger of the fight response is essential in healing Cptsd. We need the aid of our fight response to empower the process of thought-stopping the critic.

I cannot over-encourage you to use your anger to stop the critic in its tracks. We can re-hijack the anger of the critic’s attack, and forcefully redirect it at the critic instead of ourselves. We can then silently and internally say “No!” or “Stop!” or “Shut Up!” to short-circuit drasticizing and perfectionistic mental processes.

Angrily saying “No!” to the critic sets an internal boundary against unnatural, anti-self processes. It is the hammer of self-renovating carpentry that rebuilds our instinct of self-protection. Furthermore recovery is deepened by directing our anger at anyone who helped install the critic, as well as at anyone who is currently contributing to keeping it alive.

I recently received this e-mail from a website respondent who read some of my writing about angering at the critic: “Another explanation I really liked is for people that don’t have much of the FIGHT response to start using it to stop the inner critic. I am a huge fan of self-compassion which has really helped me recently (loving-kindness) and I continually just accept all the messages and just let them flow by. When I heard your comments about saying NO and rejecting them, I was like ‘Yeah- I guess Pete maybe hasn’t found it all yet.’ I was being close minded. A couple days later I tried it out and Oh My Gog has it helped. I get mad now and it just shuts down my anxiety and turns shame into blame/anger. It feels much better for me! After all it wasn’t messages I would have given to myself, and they are all messages from my parents.”

Successful critic-shrinking usually requires thousands of angry skirmishes with the critic. Passionate motivation for this work often arises when we construct an accurate picture of our upbringing. Natural anger eventually arises when we really get how little and defenseless we were when our parents bullied us into hating ourselves.

Most trauma survivors were blank slates who were brainwashed into accepting the critic as their primary identity. To the degree that a family is Cptsd-engendering, to that degree is it like a mini-cult. Cults demand absolute loyalty to the leader’s authority and belief system. In early thought-stopping work, most survivors need to empower their efforts with a healthy rage against their parents for destroying their self-loyalty and their self-individuation. However, with enough practice, the survivor’s healthy observing ego can use willpower alone to disidentify from the critic.

My son’s birth graced me with an enormous boost in my motivation to practice thought-stopping on the critic. Witnessing the many miracles of his ongoing development moved me to increasingly deepen my emotional bonding with him. This was quite disconcerting to my critic which began working overtime on its endangerment programs.

The critic warned me interminably about the danger of my rapidly expanding attachment to him. It was trying to protect me from the devastation that would ensue if my loving emotional investment turned out as badly as it did with my parents. What if untrustworthy “Life” let him die or rendered him a “bad seed.”

The critic manufactured the most dreadful horror movies of accidents, diseases, kidnapping, mental illness, oedipal betrayals, etc. Had I not known how to recognize, interpret and refuse to indulge these catastrophizations, I am sure that my capacity to bond with him would have been seriously compromised. Moreover, had I not been able to use my outrage to disidentify from the critic, thought-stopping by itself would not have been a powerful enough tool.

I particularly like this way of challenging the critic. “I’m not afraid of you anymore, mom and dad. You were the critic, and you put the critic in me. I renounce your toxic messages. Take back your shame and disgust. I am disgusted at your shameful job of parenting.”

One of my clients shared with me a phrase that spontaneously came to her while she was fighting her critic at home. “You totally ruined my childhood, and I’m not going to let you get away with ruining my life now.” She reported that this perspective emblazoned in her consciousness, and now often helps to fire her up to fire the critic.

Shame Is Blame Unfairly Turned Against The Self

The great psychologist, Erik Eriksen, gave us a great tool when he formulated this emotional mathematics equation. “Shame is blame turned against the self”. Our parents were too big and powerful to blame, so we had to blame ourselves instead. Now, however we are free of them, and we can cut off the critic’s shame supply by redirecting unfair self-blame back to our parents.

You can redirect the anger of the critic’s blaming messages away from you. You can direct the anger onto the installers of the critic, or sideways onto the critic itself. You can give shame back by allowing yourself to feel angry and disgusted at the image of your parent bullying you. You can rage at them for overwhelming you with shame when you were too young and small to defend yourself.

An inner critic that has dominated us since childhood, however, does not give up its rulership of the psyche easily. It stubbornly refuses to accept the updated information that adulthood now offers the possibility of increasing safety and healthy attachment. It is as if the critic has worn a flashback-inducing groove in the brain the size of the Grand Canyon. Now, any of the thinking patterns listed earlier can hair-trigger an amygdala-hijacking that dumps us into the abandonment mélange.

Progress in critic-shrinking is often infinitesimally slow and indiscernible at first. Our brains have become addicted to only noticing what is wrong and what is dangerous. And as with most addictions, breaking this deeply entrenched habit may require lifelong management.

In early recovery work, we need to challenge the critic’s monocular negative focus over and over with all the ferocity we can muster. Eventually with practice we can find a part of ourselves that is mad about how grossly unfair our parents’ bullying and indifference was. We can find a part of us that is outraged that we were indoctrinated and inculcated into chronically abandoning and bullying ourselves. We can fume that this occurred when we were too young to protest or even know what was happening to us. We can gradually build our ability to say “No!” and “Shut up!” whenever we catch the critic attacking us.

With enough healthy inner self-defense, the survivor gradually learns to reject her unconscious acceptance of self-abuse and self-abandonment. Her sense of healthy self-protection begins to emerge and over time grows into a fierce willingness to stop unfair criticism - internal or external.

Psychologically speaking, this is part of the process of working through repetition compulsion. Deconstructing repetition compulsion has both an internal and external dimension. On the internal dimension, we decrease the habit of repetitively perpetrating our parents’ abuse against ourselves by staunchly confronting the inner critic. This then allows us to become more mindful on the external dimension when others reenact our parents’ mistreatment. We can then confront them to stop, or banish them from our lives. With enough practice, we can repudiate our parents’ awful legacy of teaching us that love means numbly accepting abuse and neglect.

Further encouragement and guidance for therapeutically angering at the critic can be found in Soul Without Shame, by Byron Brown, and Healing Your Emotional Self by Beverly Engel.

Embracing The Critic

In my experience, until the fight response is substantially restored, the Cptsd client benefits little from CBT, psychodynamic or mindfulness techniques that encourage us to accept the critic. In later recovery, when the survivor has removed the venomous stinger from the critic, these techniques can be quite valuable. Then, and only then, are we able to reconnect with the helpful side of healthy self-criticism [see Stone and Stone’s book Embracing Your Inner Critic].

A typical indication that the critic has mellowed into being functional is that it speaks to us in a kind and helpful voice. It reminds us dispassionately to adjust our behavior when we can and ought to be doing something better. If, however, it blasts us for imperfection, it is giving itself away as the toxic critic that was installed by our parents.

A left-brained, objective approach of embracing the critic is rarely helpful unless it is balanced with a subjective, right-brained capacity for assertive self-protection. Perhaps this is because the inner critic appears to operate simultaneously with hyper-emotional right-brain flashback dynamics. Perhaps toxic inner critic processes are so emotionally overwhelming that efforts to resist them rationally and dispassionately are too weak to be effective.

THOUGHT-SUBSTITUTION AND THOUGHT-CORRECTION

Thought-substitution, especially in the form of thought-correction, is another essential tool for empowering the work of thought-stopping the critic. Many years ago, I sensed that my critic became as tough as a body-builder’s bicep through myriad repetitions. I guessed that similarly exercising self-protective responses to the critic would build my thought-correction muscles. It did in fact, and my instinct to protect myself almost always arises automatically now when I am triggered into a flashback. I believe I am not exaggerating when I say that tens of thousands of positive thought-substitutions have rewarded me with a psyche that is fairly consistently user-friendly.

Accordingly, I encourage you to immediately confront the critic’s negative messages with positive ones like those in the list at the beginning of the chapter. This is essential in Cptsd recovery, because a single unconfronted toxic thought can act like a virus and rage infectiously out of control into a flu-like mélange of shame, fear and helplessness.

Moving quickly into thought-stopping and thought correction often obviates a headlong tumble into the downward spiral of a flashback. This is essential in critic-work, as the critic typically attacks us more viciously once it has gotten up a head of steam. At such times, the critic can hypocritically scorn us for falling back into self-criticism when we “should” know better. This is the time then, more than ever, to “thought-correct and not self-berate,” as my last intern liked to say to her clients.

Additionally, I encourage you to write out a list of your positive qualities and accomplishments to read it to yourself if you get lost in self-hate. Toolbox 5 in chapter 16 is a practical exercise to help you elaborate this list in a multidimensional way.

Making a written record of your positive attributes is especially helpful as flashbacks often create a temporary amnesia about your essential worthiness and goodness. Flashbacks seem to involve a temporary loss of access to more current left-brain learning. MRI’s show greatly reduced left-brain activity in hyper-aroused Cptsd survivors. In my experience, memorizing your list enhances your capacity to dissolve that amnesia.

Reciting part or all of your list over and over like a mantra can also help you during those times when the critic is particularly severe and relentless. If you have trouble making the list or filling out Toolbox 5, ask a friend or a therapist for their input. Additionally, please let me remind you that qualities do not have to be perfect or ever-present to qualify as qualities. If it is true of you most of the time then, it is a quality.

Finally, positive visualization can be a powerful adjunct to thought-substitution. Some survivors gradually learn to short-circuit the fear-mongering processes of the critic by invoking images of past successes and accomplishments, as well as picturing safe places, loving friends or comforting memories. There are also a variety of CD’s available at places like Amazon.com that contain guided meditations that use positive language and imagery in a way that enhances deactivation and relaxation.

Perspective-Substitution And Correction

The most important thought correction of all is a switch in the perspective of our thinking.

Perspective-substitution is a broadening of our overall perspective. It moves our viewpoint from the critic’s narrow, negative focus to the more balanced and accurate focus of the observing ego – the mindful self.

Perspective-substitution helps us to dethrone the critic from its life-negating point of view. This resembles the firing of a bad manager or inept coach – one with a distorted view who dwells so much on what is wrong that he cannot see anything that is right.

As stated in chapter 1, perspective-substitution can be enhanced with the spiritual practice of gratitude. In this vein, gratitude is a type of mindfulness that looks for empirical proof that life is essentially good even though it is also quite difficult at times.

Perspective-Substitution And Gratitude

Gratitude is a delicate subject to write about because many survivors have been abused by shaming advice to “just be grateful for what you have”. Consequently many survivors totally reject the concept of gratitude and throw the baby out with the scorn-sodden bathwater. Once again, this is quite understandable when you legitimately had little to be grateful for in your childhood.

Moreover, the concept of gratitude is damagingly used by some psychologists to support the psychological defense of denial. They tout gratitude as a fast track that can bypass traumatic pain. This is worse than absurd when applied to Cptsd survivors. It is in fact shamefully abusive to survivors because profound, extended trauma cannot be resolved until it is fully understood and worked through.

Gratitude is nevertheless a wonderful natural experience that can recurrently enhance the quality of your life. You can cultivate a perspective that is open to noticing what there is to be grateful about as long as you do not do it with the intention of creating a permanent feeling of gratitude. Over time an attitude of gratitude can gradually increase authentic gratefulness.

This can best be illustrated with the example of love. While it is of course healthy to adopt a cognitive attitude of love toward our friends and chosen family, it is impossible to feel loving all the time. If I expect that of myself, I give my inner critic endless fodder to attack me for not feeling loving enough. Similarly if I expect myself to feel grateful all the time, I keep the critic’s prodigious program of self-disappointment hale and hearty.

Nonetheless, aligning with attitudes like love and gratitude is generally therapeutic. When I am temporarily stuck in a flashback feeling alienated from life, remembering what I am usually grateful for in life can sometimes pull me out of the polarized negative thinking that helps keep the flashback alive.

Invoking gratitude is particularly difficult, and often impossible at first, because flashbacks typically strand us in an emotional overwhelm that cancels out our ability to feel anything good about life. Reminding ourselves of what is worthwhile in our lives does not seem to help much in the early phases of using this tool. However, with enough practice of positive-noticing, we can sometimes relax out of a flashback by invoking our memories of gratitude.

When I experience this at the end of an especially long flashback, positive-noticing sometimes arises spontaneously and brings with it sweet tears of gratitude. These are also typically tears of relief, and tears of an achieved sense of belonging.

These tears typically arise unbidden, seemingly out of the blue. Typically they are positively triggered by experiences of beauty or connection, such as when flowers authentically strike me as beautiful once again, or when my appreciation of music returns and deeply moves my soul, or when I suddenly fully feel how much I love my wife, my son, my friend or my client.

After a painful lapse in being able to emotionally enjoy these experiences, this return brings these gratitude-laden tears which on really momentous occasions can vacillate between crying and laughing as I resurface into authentically being grateful to be alive.

Once again, my experience is that the more I practice the thought substitution of focusing on what I am grateful for, the sooner genuine gratitude returns to me on the occasions that I lose touch with it.

A powerful way to practice perspective-correction is as follows. After you go to bed at night, list at least ten positive happenings of the day. More often than not these will not be peak experiences, but rather basic and simple pleasures and appreciations. They may be as simple as a catchy tune, an engaging color, a sweet scent, an enjoyable food serving of the day, a new flower in a local garden, a satisfying TV show, a neighbor’s hello, a feeling of fitness climbing the stairs, soothing words from a favorite author, or a pleasant encounter with a pet.

Decades of this practice have helped me immeasurably to upgrade the sour perspective I inherited from my parents. Alignment with this function of the healthy observing ego provides us with a more balanced and accurate perception of life and other people.

The Neuroplasticity Of The Brain

I am repeatedly heartened to read the accumulating evidence from neuroscience research that proves the neuroplasticity of the brain. Neuroplasticity means that the brain can grow and change throughout our life. Old self-destructive neural pathways can be diminished and new healthier ones can replace them. A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis inspiringly explicates this fact. This fact helps me to remember that the critic can indeed literally be shrunk via longterm, frequent and dedicated use of the thought-stopping, thought-substitution and thought-correction practices.

As recovery progresses, you notice the critic sooner before its attack becomes multidimensional. This then allows you to take more immediate self-protective action. Moreover, Cptsd flashbacks can be utilized as evidence of, and in later stages of recovery, proof of your childhood traumatization. Flashbacks point irrefutably to the fact that your parent’s abandonment forced you to habituate to hypervigilance and negative noticing.