Focuses on inner child work, reparenting, and facing your shadow as ways to recover from CPTSD. By Pete Walker.
This book focuses on integrating and healing from trauma from complex post traumatic stress disorder. Focuses on inner child work, reparenting, and facing your shadow.
Other Highlights #
- Fire is the sun unwinding itself out of the wood.
- There are also various somatic therapies that can help our bodies heal. As with my earlier comments about CBT, I encourage you to be wary of somatic approaches that claim to heal Cptsd without working on the cognitive and emotional levels described above. Some approaches, in fact, blanketly dismiss cognitive work in a way that sidesteps the crucial work of shrinking the inner critic. Some approaches also believe that their techniques eliminate the fundamental necessity of grieving the losses of childhood, and understanding how abusive and negligent parenting is at the root of our problems.
- Self-criticism, then, runs non-stop in a desperate attempt to avoid rejection-inducing mistakes. Drasticizing becomes obsessive to help the child foresee and avoid punishment and worsening abandonment. At the same time, it continuously fills her psyche with stories and images of catastrophe.
- Early abuse and abandonment forces the child to merge his identity with the superego, the part of the child’s brain that learns the rules of his caretakers in order to get and maintain acceptance. However, because acceptance is impossible in the Cptsd-engendering family, the superego gets stuck working overtime to achieve the impossible. Perseverating on finding a formula to win over her parents, the child eventually embraces perfectionism as a strategy to make her parents less dangerous and more engaging. Her one hope is that if she becomes smart, helpful, pretty, and flawless enough, her parents will finally care for her.
- The above is of course a blatant example of the slaughtering of emotional expression. Just as common is the insidious, passive-aggressive assault on emoting which is seen in the parent who shuns her child for expressing his feelings. This is seen in the emotionally abandoning parent who sequesters the child in a timeout for crying, or routinely retreats from the crying child into her room.
- Cptsd-engendering parents often hypocritically attack their children’s emotional expression in a bi-modal way. This occurs when the child is both abused for emoting and is, at the same time, abused by her caretaker’s toxic emotional expression.
- The inner critic is sometimes so hostile to grieving that shrinking the critic may need to be your first recovery priority. Until the critic is sufficiently tamed, grieving can actually make flashbacks worse, rather than perform the restorative processes it alone can initiate.
- Psychologically speaking, mindfulness is taking undistracted time to become fully aware of your thoughts and feelings so that you can have more choice in how you respond to them. Do I really agree with this thought, or have I been pressured into believing it? How do I want to respond to this feeling – distract myself from it, repress it, express it or just feel it until it changes into something else?
- Sometimes this is most poignantly described as not being liked by your parents, which belies the many Cptsd-inducing parents who say they love their children, but demonstrate in a thousand ways that they do not like them. “The sight of you makes me sick” was very popular with such parents when I was growing up.
- When our emotional intelligence is restricted, we often do not know what we really want, and can consequently struggle mightily with even the smallest decisions.
- The rejecting responses of our parents to our emotional expression alienate us from our feelings. Emotional abuse/neglect scares us out of our own emotions while simultaneously making us terrified of other people’s feelings.
- Those who cannot feel their sadness often do not know when they are being unfairly excluded, and those who cannot feel their normal angry or fearful responses to abuse, are often in danger of putting up with it without protest.
- Many survivors benefit greatly from classes and books on assertiveness training
- 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