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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Azure Coyote, USA, 2013, p. 299
Shame and self-hate did not start with me, but with all my heart, I deem that they will stop with me. I will do to myself as I would have others doing to me.
She noted the effects of a negative father complex in her journal, writing: God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship, and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust? I sit here without identity: faceless.
Trauma is the story of a wound that cries out in the attempt to remember and to tell.
The denial of need for others often is misinterpreted as self-adoration.
Because turning inward takes time, she turns outward. Impatient, she lives in ethereal existence, perpetually moving and striving for immediate satisfaction or achievement. The inner drive comes not only from the oral hunger and omnipotent fantasies but also from the frustration that the world can never satisfy.
If betrayal is perpetrated mainly for personal advantage (to get out of a tight spot, to hurt or use, to take care of Number One), then one can be sure that love had less the upper hand than did the brute power.
The therapeutic situation is the only place explicitly provided for in the social contract in which we are allowed to talk about the wounds we have suffered and to search for possible new identities and new ways of talking about ourselves.
If you contemplate your lack of fantasy, inspiration and inner aliveness, which you feel as sheer stagnation and a barren wilderness, and impregnate it with the interest born of alarm at your inner death, then something can take shape in you, for your inner emptiness conceals just as great a fullness if only you will allow it to penetrate into you.
What to the rational mind seems a flaw is often a profoundly mysterious key to the secret of individual life … When we pathologize human foibles in our relentless way, trying to subdue and purify life, we kill the soul.
Without an accurate inner mirroring, she assesses herself to be either inferior or superior to others … To recover herself is a process requiring a dive into the unconscious.
Many women without fathers are ‘in a state between what they fear in their own minds and what they fear in the outside world’ (Solomon) There is a need for the illusionary and the wished-for world to compensate for the weight of the pervasive anxiety.
In order to be lovable and loved, she must cease to exist and so must destroy all her aliveness in a constant struggle against being who she is. This conflict and resistance becomes a kind of self-torture. On the other hand, to experience oneself as a real person, with a sense of self and a capacity to make her own choices brings the risk of violent retaliation ... It is an irresolvable impasse, which eventually leads the daughter to a state of despair. To love means to exist and to want to have one’s independent existence recognized and responded to by the loved other.
While the façade makes it appear she is there when she is not, it also keeps her from knowing herself. Closeness is threatening. She is too hurt, cut off, afraid, damaged and lonely.
To know our self is to know our complexes individually and distinctively and become aware of how they change and morph through life.
The mind has the capacity to bring something back again which has been related to an object, without the object being there.
Attachment has formed, not to the father, but to the gap, the presence of absence that contains desire, morning and longing… Existence becomes a mere waiting for the moment, not yet here, when real life and love will begin.
The crisis in the paternal function that led to the deficiency of psychic space is in fact an erosion of the loving father. The function of the father is dead, in so far as his function is giving and loving with his whole heart.
… absence of memory, absence in the mind, absence of contact, absence of feeling all – all these absences can be condensed in the idea of a gap… instead of referring to a simple void or something which is missing, becomes the substratum of what is real.
Although the self, in the Jungian sense, cannot be destroyed, it can be isolated from the impact of all experiences through the creation of impenetrable defenses.
When a daughter is uncertain of who she is because she is uncertain of how she is seen, she experiences anxiety. The father’s mental representation is internalized, allowing the child and then the adult to find herself in the other. When this is not available, protest, despair and detachment eventually become the responses.
I know fatherlessness. I know the emptiness it creates, the years searching for something to help fill the void, looking for a substitute to make me whole. I know the insecurity; the endless battles with doubts that are re-created with each new relationship – battles that are never one; the pain that resurfaces after each departure of a relationship... the distinct patterns of sadness, insecurity, confusion, and unresolved pain of those who experience father loss either through death, divorce, or abandonment.
Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty According to my bond, no more no less.
There is a treachery, a secret psychic death that begins in childhood when a child is unloved and unseen, the ‘I’ unnoticed. A center of gravity that should be internalized becomes loosened and damaged.
Those who just became dutiful daughters obliterate themselves, becoming ghosts, playing rules, just getting by.
The repressed and neglected insist on being known.
The self – wounded, incomplete, empty, is felt to have a fundamental flaw, a congenital deficiency. Such logic presupposes a severe superego and a complex dialectic of idealization and devalorization, both of self and other. It is an identification with the loved/hated other – through incorporation, introjection, projection – that is affected by the taking into oneself of an ideal, sublime, part or trait of the other and that becomes the tyrannical inner judge.
Unfortunately, those who take the advice to forgive abuses that they have not fully grieved, abuses that are still occurring, and/or abuses so heinous they should and could never be forgiven, often find themselves getting nowhere in the recovery process.
If an adult does not protect when a child is being attacked with destructive criticism, she is in an unspoken alliance with the critic. The child is forced to assume contempt is normal and acceptable. The witnessing adult has forsaken her/his tribal responsibility to protect the child from parents who perpetrate child abuse.
A child, with parents who are unable or unwilling to provide safe enough attachment, has no one to whom she can bring her whole developing self. No one is there for reflection, validation and guidance. No one is safe enough to go to for comfort or help in times of trouble. There was no one to cry to, to protest unfairness to, and to seek compassion for hurts, mistakes, accidents, and betrayals. No one is safe enough to shine with, to do show and tell with, and to be reflected as a subject of pride. There is no one to even practice the all important intimacy building skills of conversation.
Feelings of abandonment commonly masquerade as the physiological sensation of hunger. Hunger pains soon after a big meal is rarely truly about food. Typically it is camouflaged emotional hunger and the longing for safe, nurturing connection. Food cannot satiate the hunger pain of abandonment.
Perhaps there was no more detrimental consequence of our childhood abandonment then being forced to habitually hide our authentic selves. Many of us come out of childhood believing that what we have to say is as uninteresting to others as it was to our parents.
Each survivor does well to assess whether his angering or crying is blocked or still stultified, and then work at recovering it.
Dysfunctional parents typically reserve their worst punishments for their child’s anger. This then traps the child’s anger inside.
We grieve the loss of childhood because these losses are like deaths of important parts of ourselves. Effective grieving brings these parts back to life.
The most common transferential dynamic that I witness occurs when leftover hurt about a parent gets displaced onto someone we perceive as hurting us in the present. When this occurs, we respond to them with a magnified anger or anguish that is out of proportion to what they did.
Fear of parental reprisal is often the unconscious dynamic that scares us out of challenging our own toxic thinking.
When a fight-type parent scapegoats those around him, he enforces a perverse kind of mirroring. He’s making sure that when he feels bad, so does everyone else.
If we are ever to discover the comfort of soothing connection with others the critic’s dictatorship of the mind must be broken. The outer critic’s arsenal of intimacy spoiling dynamics must be consciously identified and gradually deactivated.
The outer critic is the part that views everything else as flawed and unworthy. When the outer critic is running your mind, people appear to be too awful and too dangerous to trust.
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.
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 not to be doing something better.
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.
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.
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.
There’s an invisible social context to toxic shame attacks. Toxic shame is social because the inner critic came into existence through pathological interactions with her 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.
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 effect or emotional tone of the inner critic.
Most survivors spend a tremendous amount of time barely conscious of how incessantly self-critical they are.
A traumatized child becomes desperate to relieve the anxiety and depression of abandonment. The critic-driven child can only think about the ways she’s too much or not enough. The child’s unfolding sense of self, a healthy ego, finds no room to develop. Her identity virtually becomes the critic. The superego trumps the ego.
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.
… 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.
The child then feels that he is once again trapped in the past where he was so devastatingly abandoned. Perhaps, the resulting flashback is his only way to really get your attention.
Sometimes … the best understanding you can achieve is an overarching one that your inner child is feeling profoundly abandoned. She is cowering from the humiliating attack from your critic and needs you to switch gears and demonstrate that you will care for her no matter what.
Managing the pain of waking up in the abandonment depression is one of the most difficult, long-term challenges in recovery. Sleep seems to be a regressive, right brain dominant experience. It is not uncommon to wake up with a temporary loss of access to the left brain cognitive functions that control our more sophisticated understandings of our present-day reality.
With undetectable triggers, I find that it is most helpful to see a flashback as a communication from the child that you were.
The inner critic not only exacerbates flashbacks, but eventually grows into a psychic agency that triggers them.
It’s disturbing how many drasticizing inner critic rants end with an image of homelessness. What a symbol of abandonment!
Numerous times I have heard victims say: “but, I don’t want to act like a victim!” Usually, I then try to help them see how much they truly were victims in childhood. However, if I cannot get them to see this they usually are not able to rescue themselves from their current victimization.
Sadly, the closest that the unrecovered fawn type comes to getting his needs met is vicariously through helping others.
Codependency is a fear-based inability to express rights, needs and boundaries in a relationship. It is a disorder of assertiveness, characterized by a dormant fight response and susceptibility to being exploited, abused, and/or neglected.
Once a child realizes that being useful and not requiring anything for herself gets her some positive attention from her parents, codependency begins to grow. It becomes an increasingly automatic habit over the years.
Step one is working to complete exhaustion. Step two is collapsing into extreme vegging out, and waiting until his energy reaccumulates enough to relaunch into step one.
The disenfranchisement of the fawn type begins in childhood. She learns early that a modicum of safety and attachment can be gained by becoming the helpful and compliant servant of her exploitive parents. A fawn type/codependent is usually the child of at least one narcissistic parent. The narcissist reverses the parent-child relationship. The child is parentified and takes care of the needs of the parent, who acts like a needy and sometimes tantruming child.
Self-compassion and crying is an unparalleled tool for shrinking the obsessive preservations of the critic, and for ameliorating the habits of compulsive rushing. As her recovery progresses, the flight type can acquire a “gearbox” that allows her to engage life at a variety of speeds, including neutral. Neutral is especially important for flight types to cultivate.
When the obsessive/compulsive flight type is not doing, she is worrying and planning about doing… flight types are also susceptible to the process addictions of workaholism and busier holism. To keep these processes humming, they can deteriorate into stimulating substance addictions.
They are obsessively and compulsively driven by the unconscious belief that perfection will make them safe and lovable. They rush to achieve. They rush as much in thought [obsession] as they do in action [compulsion].
A survivor also avoids vulnerable-relating because his past makes him believe that he will be attacked or abandoned as he was in childhood. This is why showing vulnerability often triggers painful emotional flashbacks.
Fight types develop a narcissistic-like defense. Flight types develop an obsessive/compulsive-like defense. Freeze types develop a dissociative-like defense. Fawn types develop a codependent–like defense.
The child projects his hope for being accepted onto self-perfection.
In my experience, deep level recovery is often reflected in the narrative that highlights the role of emotional neglect in describing what one has suffered and what one continues to deal with.
It was not until I learned to assign the pain of numerous current-time emotional flashbacks to the abject loneliness of my childhood, that I was able to work effectively on the repetition compulsion that led me into so many neglectful relationships.
The child projects his hope for being accepted onto self-perfection.
The inner critic‘s negative perspective creates many programs of self-rejecting perfectionism.
The outer layer for some is the stark physical evidence of abuse, e. g., sexual abuse or excessive corporal punishment. Subsequent layers involve verbal, spiritual and emotional abuse. Core layers have to do with verbal, spiritual and emotional neglect.
It appears to me that just as many children acquire Cptsd from emotionally traumatizing families as from physically traumatizing ones.
We live in an emotionally impoverished culture, and those who stick with the 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 nature than those in their general population.
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.
Unless we speak up, the loneliness of our silence will imprison us forever.
Progress not perfection… 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 effectiveness, 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.
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 worst thing that can happen to a child is to be unwelcome in his family of origin – to never feel included. Moreover, many survivors have little or no experience of any social arena they feel safe and welcoming.
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.
… without access to our uncomfortable or painful feelings we are deprived of the most fundamental part of our ability to notice when something is unfair, abusive, or neglectful in our environments.
Unfortunately, Cptsd-inducing parents thwart the growth of the ego by undermining the development of the crucial ego and processes of self-compassion and self-protection. They do this by shaming or intimidating you whenever you have a natural impulse to have sympathy for yourself, or stand up for yourself. The instinct to care for yourself and to protect yourself against unfairness is then forced to become dormant.
Early abuse and abandonment forces the child to merge the 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.
Cognitive healing also depends on learning to choose healthy and more accurate ways of talking to and thinking about yourself. On the broadest level, this involves upgrading the story you tell yourself about your pain.
Abusive and abandoning parents can injure and abandon us on many levels: cognitive, emotional, spiritual, physical and relational.
I believe there’s an epidemic of sibling abuse that afflicts many dysfunctional families. Siblings in such families can traumatize the victim/scapegoat as severely as the parents. In families with checked-out, disinterested parents, they can in fact be the chief sources of trauma.
When contempt replaces the milk of human kindness at an early age, the child feels humiliated and overwhelmed. Too helpless to protest or even understand the unfairness of being abused, the child eventually becomes convinced that she is defective and fairly flawed. Frequently she comes to believe that she deserves her parents' persecution.
A fight response is triggered when a person suddenly responds aggressively to something threatening. A flight response is triggered when a person responds to a perceived threat by fleeing, or symbolically, launching into hyper activity. A freeze response is triggered when a person, realizing resistance is futile, gives up, numbs out into disassociation and/or collapses as if accepting the interval in the inevitability of being hurt. A fawn response is triggered when a person responds to threat by trying to be pleasing or helpful in order to appease and forestall an attacker.
Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions to the overwhelming feeling – states of being an abused/abandoned child. These feeling states can include overwhelming fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief and depression. They also include unnecessary triggering of our fight/flight instincts.
One day when her mother called Joy [Harjo] in from playing outdoors with friends, asking her to put on a shirt, her brother was allowed to continue to play shirtless. "I knew better than to talk back. In that small moment, the earthy delight of being five years old, of being utterly body and breath, came falling down."
Like Inanna's story, hers [Artemis] is not about your parenting qualities. At bottom, it's about trying to compensate for not getting what you needed from your parents.
Negative father complexes destroy self-esteem and leave men and women hard on themselves and others. There is an underlying sense of rage at the mother for not protecting. Whenever a parent is destructive to a child, mythology (Gaia, Zeus, and Kronos, for example) shows that it is an archetypal obligation for the other parent to totally defend the child.
… we live in what we refer to as a patriarchy. This means that our culture has a negative father complex. And this means that if we are unhappy, if life is bad or our self-esteem is low, we are compelled to think that achievement is the only thing that can help us. In this case, achievement is not fueled by the pleasure, love, or creativity in what we are doing. It is driven by compulsion. This compulsion can never be satisfied.
We are always disappointed by our fathers. If we don't learn that lesson we never grow up - we never mature or become our "own persons."
… the precursor of the emotion we call love is to be found not in the sex instinct and the relationship between sexual partners but in the maternal instinct and the relation of the mother to her child. Therefore, unless this relationship is a positive one and unless it develops favorably, the adult will be hampered all his life for want of a satisfactory foundation on which his later relationships can be based.
The difference between the self-aware Mother who is loving, attentive, fair, and kind and the fearful, self-doubting, or resentful shadow Mother is that one helps herself and society thrive and the other unconsciously sabotages these goals.
A shadow Mother may see her children merely as extensions of her ego or family and not as individuals with unique needs and distinct destinies that diverge from hers.
Mother can become subtly manipulative or quite ruthless when her point of view is not recognized or when she has not received her due. Peer relationships can be difficult for Mother. She is often more impatient with her peers than she is with those who depend on her. Even in casual conversations she tends to instruct or give advice. When she does not feel useful and appreciated, Mother tends to be more exacting than understanding, and more judging than accepting.
Early trauma related to your human mother contributes to your Mother archetype's shadow. Sometimes this is called the Death Mother.
A negative mother complex leaves us feeling like we and the world are bad and threatening. We are ruled by a basic sense of fear, distrust, and that we are to blame. And we are afraid of our underlying rage. These feelings make the struggle with the complex, which needs to be very aggressive, difficult.
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