Quotes About Recovery

Cptsd is a more severe form of Post-traumatic stress disorder. It is delineated from this better known trauma syndrome by five of its most common and troublesome features: emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self-abandonment, a vicious inner critic and social anxiety.

As deep and meaningful connection with another becomes more available and frequent, the survivor increasingly experiences the shrinking of his abandonment depression.

As emotional recovery progresses, the mindfulness described above begins to extend toward our emotional experience. This helps us to stop automatically dissociating from our feelings. We then learn to identify our feelings and choose healthy ways to respond to them and from them.

I sometimes recommend that readers view the table of contents and start with whatever headings most strike a chord. Although the book is laid out in a somewhat linear fashion, everyone's journey of recovering is different, and journeys can be initiated in a variety of ways.

If I am a bit repetitive at times about issues like shrinking the critic and grieving the losses of childhood, it is my attempt to find different ways to emphasize the great importance of engaging these themes of recovery work over and over again. If you find yourself lost and not sure of how to get back onto the map, these themes will always be key portals for reentry.

The Tao of relational recovery involves balancing healthy independence with healthy dependence on others.

SOMATIC HEALING

First, the good news about Cptsd. It is a learned set of responses, and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks. This means that it is environmentally, not genetically, caused. In other words, unlike most of the diagnoses it is confused with, it is neither inborn nor characterological. As such, it is learned. It is not inscribed in your DNA. It is a disorder caused by nurture [or rather the lack of it] not nature.

I believe Love is the home we live in before incarnation and the home we return to when we die. This, for me, is one of the deepest meanings of the adage God is Love. I also believe that the more we recover our emotional natures, the more we are able to revisit this home throughout our lives.

Deep level recovery from childhood trauma requires a normalization of depression, a renunciation of the habit of reflexively reacting to it. Central to this is the development of a self-compassionate mindfulness. Once again, mindfulness is the practice of staying in your body – the practice of staying fully present to all of your internal experience.

We need to understand exactly how appalling parenting created the now self-perpetuating trauma that we live in. We can learn to do this in a way that takes the mountain of unfair self-blame off ourselves.

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.

When you intricately understand how antagonistic your parents were to your healthy sense of self, you become more motivated to engage in the self-help processes of rectifying their damage. The more you identify their damage the more you know what to fix.

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.

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.

One common sign of being flashed-back is that we feel small, helpless, and hopeless.

We grieve the losses of childhood because these losses are like deaths of important parts of ourselves. Effective grieving brings these parts back to life. In this chapter we describe the healing that is available through the four practices of grieving: angering, crying, verbal ventilating and feeling.

Many survivors are so identified with the critic that it becomes their whole identity. Such survivors typically need to focus on fighting off the critic until they have established the healthy ego function of self-protection.

The survivor may, seemingly without reason, visualize someone being abusive.

Some survivors have confidence but not self-esteem.

As a survivor becomes more adept at angering and crying, fear of his feelings will decrease, and opportunities to learn to simply feel will present themselves.

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.

The key point is that these labels are incomplete and unnecessarily shaming descriptions of what the survivor is actually afflicted with.

I once heard renowned traumatologist, John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet.