“ The hypervigilance of Complex PTSD is an overaroused
sympathetic nervous system fixation on endangerment that comes from
long-term childhood exposure to real danger. In an effort to recognize,
predict and avoid danger, hypervigilance develops in a traumatized child
as an incessant, on-guard scanning of both the real environment and,
most especially, the imagined upcoming environment. Hypervigilance
typically devolves into intense performance anxiety on every level of
self-expression, and perfectionism festers into a virulent inner voice
that manifests as self-hate, self-disgust and self-abandonment at every
turn.
When the child with Complex PTSD eventually comes of age
and launches from the traumatizing family, she is so dominated by
feelings of danger, shame and abandonment that she is often unaware that
adulthood now offers many new resources for achieving internal and
external safety and healthy connection with others. She is unaware that a
huge part of her identity is subsumed in the inner critic--the proxy of
her dysfunctional caregivers--and that she has had scarce room to
develop a healthy self with an accompanying healthy ego.
This
scenario arises frequently in my practice: A client, in the midst of
reporting some inconsequential miscue of the previous week, suddenly
launches into a catastrophizing tale of her life deteriorating into a
cascading series of disasters.
She is flashing back to the danger-ridden times of her childhood, and her distress sounds something like this: "My boss looked at me funny when I came back from my bathroom break this morning and I know he thinks I'm stupid and lazy and is going to fire me. I just know I won't be able to get another job.
My boyfriend will
think I'm a loser and leave me. I'll get sick from the stress, and with
no money to pay my medical insurance and rent, I'll soon be a bag lady
on the street." It's disturbing how many catastrophizing inner critic
rants end with the bag lady on the street. What a symbol of abandonment!
“
“Over the course of a therapy, I often reframe emotional
flashbacks as messages from the wounded inner child designed to
challenge denial or minimization about childhood trauma.
It is as if the inner child is clamoring for validation of past parental abuse and neglect: "See this is how bad it was--how overwhelmed, terrified, ashamed and abandoned I felt so much of the time."
When seen in this light, emotional flashbacks are also signals from the wounded child that many of her developmental needs have not been met. Most important among these are the needs for safety and for Winnicottian good-enough attachment.
There are no needs more important than those of a parent's
protection and empathy, without which a child cannot own and develop her
instincts for self-protection and self-compassion—the cornerstones of a
healthy ego. Without awakening to the need for this kind of primal
self-advocacy, clients remain stuck in learned self-abandonment and
rarely develop effective resistance to internal or external abuse, and
seldom gain the motivation to consistently use the 13 tools for managing
emotional flashbacks at the end of this article. “
-Pete Walker: Emotional Flashback Management
My internet is turned off as I write this and there is something so freeing about that. As if the dangerous world of information is standing outside my window with pitchforks and anger but they can’t get past the water moat to my mental castle due to technical difficulties.
That’s what’s so interesting - the internet is technically a neutral place but because we have evolved to seek out and expose dangerous threats, our brain looks to find danger and protect ourselves from it.
This is one of the reasons we seek out scary news even if it doesn’t immediately logically affect us ; we have evolved to want to know all the threats going on.
I know I discussed the possiblility that evolution is not what we think it is - and then I used the verb ‘ to evolve’ and I feel clear in my heart that just like everything else, the answer on whether evolution is the universally truthful narrative instead of creationism or any other theory is not black or white. It is possible that humans have evolved from their cavemen ancestors and not the idea that we all started as single celled bacteria and millions of years later are swiping left on tinder.
Have you ever seen a photo of a water bear or tartigrade? If it was on a dating site, I would love to meet them and share one piece of spaghetti.
Wow, I am so KoOky and RaNdom, right?
Last night my friend and I listened to recordings of our voices from 2015 and compared it with how we sound now and our voices are a lot more feminine and grounded. It is really so blatant how much my voice has changed and I credit it all to the emotional clearing I have done in my throat chakra by letting out my cries.
As I’ve learned from my therapist, time does NOT heal all wounds; it really comes down to re-feeling your initial pain and letting it come ‘online’ and re-animate you so you can feel it fully instead of repressing it. Once you feel it fully, it has felt ‘seen and heard’ and then it is processed and no longer needed.
Taking the course I am enrolled in has really triggered a deeper level of healing as I began to mention as I really felt the level of unsafely I have accepted as ‘normal’ 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I realize that I always attempted to protect myself as if nobody would ever help me. And I traced this back to feelings of total disappointment I had in my family to keep me safe in extremely dangerous situations.
I remember my mother hitting me when I was about 3 years old because I took the television remote from her; when she hit me, it was so horrible because I didn’t understand what was happening and it was so scary that the person who is supposed to be taking care of you is hurting you. I have brought it up to my mom as an adult and she minimizes it to say “she just swatted me on the butt because I was misbehaving’ but to a 3 year old, this is a total violation of trust and safety.
I remember being in my crib, not able to sleep, and sitting up looking at my parents sleeping. I remember not wanting to wake them up because I knew I would probably be yelled at by my dad, who would yell at me anytime I woke him up, especially when I would stay with him in New Jersey for weeks during the summer, and stay up all night because I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to face the torrent of loud painful yelling I would endure if I bothered his precious sleep.
Sometimes loud voices and sounds can feel like daggers to the heart, and this is what it was like to wake my dad up.
I really can’t believe my mom left me with my dad, knowing how horrible he was to be with - but I realize that because she did not put herself in ‘safe’ situations, it probably didn’t even register with her that I was in an unsafe place with him.
Once, at around age 4, she had a date and left me with a teenage babysitter and her boyfriend and I completely blocked out that evening and I honestly wonder if they sexually abused me. Either way, I felt so unsafe with them and they made fun of me and my mom for having pet rats and I felt so completely alone and scared and betrayed by my mother time and time again, which is a challenging feeling to experience when you know deep down she was in her early 30s (younger than me), was not kept safe by her own parents in ‘more’ harrowing violating abusive experiences beyond just hitting (though every experience of trauma feels equally horrible to a child, physical, sexual or emotional)
I have never felt like anyone in my family could keep me safe; and instead, they were the source of danger, except for my Aunt, who I loved so much but who I was not close with. I felt like everyone else was a source of harm, ontop of the bullying I experienced in school, and the weird jealous friends my mom had when I was very young (usually male) who made it obvious that they wished my mother didn’t have a child as I was just a hinderance or reminder of the fact that she had a husband before them. I never ever felt safe and never found an adult ‘mentor’ or teacher who really saw just how anxious I was.
If anything, I remember my 2nd grade teacher Ms Pacifico saying “why are you such a worrywart, Carlen? Stop saying sorry all the time” - I remember in 8th grade yearbook, they wrote “in 25 years, Carlen will ______stop saying sorry”…… I was so ashamed that it was that obvious that I was a constant apologizer. I had the yearbook staff change “stops saying sorry” to “owning a Petshop” because that sounded like a way more respectable achievement in my eyes. It was still a shameful experience to know that a collective of students were so aware of my apologetic tendencies to the point that they would have a group consensus together and say “Carlen stops saying sorry! Sounds like a great goal for her as an adult!” How embarrassing - but also how sad that it was that much of a cry for help, and nobody really did anything about it.
How could nobody have noticed how much pain I was in? And to top it off, my mother sent me to an elderly therapist with a “blank screen” emotionless personality who would FALL. ASLEEP. And another one, who accused me of stealing a puzzle piece and made me confess even though I didn’t do it.
Even to this day, when I go to stores, I have carried this deep inner fear that a security guard will stop me as I leave and accuse me of stealing. As I write this, I realize now WHY I have carried this. I think of another time in 3rd grade, I stole a walnut from the supermarket from a large barrel and my mother made us go back to the store and I had to return it to a random man and apologize and it was so scary and humiliating to have some random tall man working in the grocery store look down on me as a bad child and I had to apologize and feel like I did the worst crime in the world.
When I was in 11th grade, I had a classmate who would brag about how easy it was to steal clothing from Abercrombie & Fitch and so I stole 2 shirts from there and it was so exciting since my mom wouldn’t buy me any clothing from that expensive of a store. That was the only day I ever stole anything but it was so exciting. Yet meanwhile, I still walk around with this intense level of shame that I will be found out when I leave any supermarket, as if someone will say “stop right there, let us go through your bags.” And then they will arrest me and put me in jail, even if I don’t have anything. As I am writing this all, I just took a break to really F E E L the initial pain of shame and fear that I felt as a child, as I know this is the way to heal it , instead of dismissing it as trivial.
i believe that experiences show up in our lives to attempt to get us to heal our initial wounding/trauma and it is up to us to face the fear or keep dismissing/bypassing it and have it show up later in life, in a different relationship or situation.
For example, my friend George dresses in tattered pants and shirts - and his skin is always darkened with dust from a life outdoors - he seems kind of like a homeless Johnny Depp (a group of Asian tourists told him he looked like Johnny Depp, which we both found funny but also kind of accurate), with a tattered hooded sweatshirt and a baseball cap under his hood, shielding his face - and when we would go into stores together, I felt like people looked at him as if he was off-putting and probably stealing things. And by proxy, I felt like they looked at me as if *I* was stealing things. This feeling of assured suspicion and the possibility of arrest made going into stores especially anxiety-provoking and George and I decided a few months into our friendship that he would always wait outside anytime I went anywhere.
It would be funny sometimes as he would wait outside the fancy supermarket Erewhon and eat from their garbage can, while I was inside buying a $19 salad bar lunch, and we would sit together and each eat our foods, from the same restaurant (technically). It was both funny but also humiliating at the thought of a security guard coming over to chastise George (which luckily Never happened) - but I carried a heightened level of “Oh no, I am about to get in trouble” feeling, regardless.
George reminded me that most store security guards get paid like minimum wage and are not emotionally too invested in their jobs to the point that they would ever yell at anyone they suspect of shoplifting.
They would never put me in some confession-style room with a bright light on like an old 80s movie police station scene where a detective says to a suspect “Do you want to do this the easy way, or the hard way?” sitting in their backwards turned chair, daggers in their eyes. When I was in highschool, I would love to go to a perfume shop called The Body Shop after school and smell all the essential oil perfume testers as a way to ‘treat’ myself at the end of the day.
My best friend at the time would take out her backpack and begin applying her own makeup in the store’s window and then put her makeup back in her bag. It made me so extremely nervous that she would be accused of shoplifitng because she was putting makeup in her bag - and I remember she acted like I was completely over-reacting , which was the constant dynamic of our 21 year friendship until I ended it in the summer of 2017 which was one of the hardest but most self-honoring things I have ever done in my life. I remember once, the security guard went up to my friend and asked to look through her bag - which she nonplussed said yes to - and he didn’t find anything, and then we left. I was in shock at how little she cared at the thought of being accused, but I realize in hindsight, she hadn’t felt the level of shame I had from my earlier childhood experiences so it didn’t have the same ‘emotional flashback’’ for her as it did for me.
One of the hallmark signs of obsessive compulsive disorder is inappropriate/unwanted thoughts - and to me, this is the brain trying to constantly protect the person from experiencing the initial trauma. Most people try to push away the unwanted thought, as if that is just a random annoyance - not realizing it is the brain’s way of trying to protect the person from feeling the full extend of the pain of the initial trauma feeling that they are constantly repressing. The solution is to lean into the unwanted thought and sit with the pain while breathing deeply and doing your best to trace it back to the initial pain and then feeling that in its entirety. This is usually not possible as children because we feel too unsafe to feel these things.
This is why its so helpful to have a trauma-aware therapist who can help be a loving witness to you as you experience the feeling in it’s entirety and remind you that you are in the present-day and your present-size adult body to protect you as you go through the extreme rollercoaster of highs and lows of your initial trauma feeling, which was too much for you to experience as a child, but has since gotten lodged into your body as trapped energy. Emotion is energy in motion but when energy gets ‘stuck’ this is how mental and physical illness starts.
The past few days has been me re-living and fully feeling the pain which has made me it’s prisoner all these years. The pain which has made me seek constant vigilance against danger, for fear I would experience even more pain on top of this pain. The irony is that all of the worrying I have involuntarily done to avoid pain and danger in my life is most likely a lot more painful than just a short burst of pain from the outside world. But the thing is, I craved control so I wanted to be the source of my pain instead of the ‘surprise’ element of pain from the outside world.
As I mentioned in a previous post, last week I went to my chiropractors. One thing I left out was that I was given a new diet plan including green vegetable powder, red vegetable powder (called MacroGreens, and MacroReds - created by my chiropractor - which I made him sign his autograph on, as sort of a joke but sort of true admiration) - One thing he gave me was a supplement pill containing beef liver, heart and adrenal glands.
I am not kidding when I say that this liver pill has given me more energy than I have ever had as an adult, I take it and I feel like I am invincible and can do anything I want. I have only taken it for 4 days in a row since my appointment but on the first day I began crying because I finally felt what It was like to have energy for the first time and really realize fully that I was not ‘lazy’ growing up, I was just truly exhausted and vitamin deficient (among other things)
It dawned on me last night that there is a correlation between taking this new supplement and all of the massive awareness and healing I am having while taking my course. I NEEDED to have a certain threshold of physical energy in order to process the deep level of healing and long forgotten pain-feeling that has been waiting for the right time to be processed.
This really validates my growing suspicion that it takes a certain amount of energy to process our emotions and that exhaustion is a protection mechanism to stop us from having to deal with pain which we fear we might not be able to handle/survive from.
I suspect that much of America’s exhaustion is self-protective because it prevents the person from having to feel the intensity of their pain, just like I have been doing.
When you are a child, if your parents were not taught the tools to deal with their emotions, it Is very plausible that you will repress your feelings because you know you will be shamed or punished or ignored (abandoned) for your big feelings so you stuff them down. In order to continuously stuff them down, you need some kind of coping-ally, whether that is exhaustion or intrusive thoughts, or both (which was the case for me)
It is much easier to blame yourself for being “crazy” and that “something is wrong with you” than it is to blame your parents for providing an unsafe home environment with constant fighting, especially if you are too young to even verbalize these feelings, which would likely fall on non-understanding ears, like I experienced.
I felt ashamed of the sadness and fear I had because I knew that my mother was trying her best and I also felt like she was my only form of safety so I couldn’t alienate her by having my big feelings.
One of the first memories to surface from plant medicine was me being born in the hospital and nobody making eye contact with me and feeling so utterly alone int he hospital. I then remembered being a baby and looking into my mother’s eyes and she not looking back into my eyes, because she was looking at something in the distance, which made me feel unsafe and unseen at the time, as if she was looking at something dangerous and couldn’t focus on me.
What’s so fascinating is that after my 2nd plant medicine experience, it told me that I should have my mom wish me a goodnight every night as if she is tucking me into bed. We have since made this a nightly ritual at 9:30pm and call it “Night night” where she sings me a funny lullaby to set the tone for sleep.
The perfect irony is that when she does this, she usually is in the living room with the television on in the background and last night as she was wishing me a goodnight, I could see her eyes watching television as the reflection of the screen was seen in her eyeglasses. It brought me back to the same initial pain of feeling unseen and unprotected as a child. I have told her multiple times that I don’t like when she is talking to me with the telvision in the background as it feels like a half-baked attempt at intimacy - but then it dawned on me that she can only meet me at the level of intimacy she is capable of.
as much as I love her, I must honor that I feel disappointed and betrayed by her even though she is trying her best. Just because someone is trying their best, it is okay to be both grateful but also know that you deserve more and are not ‘too much’ to want more - but that you have to give that level of safety and validation and honoring of feelings to yourself.
This is where Inner Child work comes in , which is talking to the younger version of you which is still inside, and at the point where the initial traumas set in which led to suppressing and repressing of emotions that were “too much” at the time, for yourself and your ill-equipped family members.
You can ask your younger self what you needed at the time and listen.
You can remember the time machine of life and come back to present moment and try to give your younger self the sense of security you didn’t get as a child.
For me, that looks like telling baby carlen I am with her and she is not too much and I can handle her crying and it is beautiful when she cries. This is the OPPOSITE of what it was like as a child, where I was shamed by my dad for crying and never completely held by my mother, who was probably intentionally numbing so she wouldn’t be triggered by my pain into having to finally deal with her initial trauma pain which she experienced as a child, and has mostly blocked out of her memory.
Our brains are really doing the best that they know how to do to protect us, and as frustrating as it is to ‘peel the onion’ of healing, it is completely genius the way our brains help us ignore things until it is safe to do so (which is ‘never’ for most people who don’t have the time, money, resources, commitment, or ENERGY to deal with them)
Just in the same way that intrusive thoughts can help protect a person from feeling their own initial trauma, it feels very likely that television-watching is the way that my mother is able to not feel things as deeply as she could, for fear that feeling things might be too much fior her to handle. This is one theory I have for why she is not completely present with me during our conversations or celebrates the weekly victories I have in my healing journey but instead begins talking about her own wins, making me feel like I am overly sensitive or dramatic to keep digging deeper and deeper into my healing, as if it is just a decadent meaningless way of avoiding ‘real work’ of having a business or some external accolade, which is the conditioning most people get, and which why it is only a small minority of people on this planet committed to their foundational internal healing instead of suppressing It down to win some external award or approval, which I did until being forced into this by my spiritual awakening in 2017, all thanks to the accidental ingestion of a full dropper of THC from my close friend who thought it was CBD. Ha!
Imagine if all the economists and astronauts on this planet obsessed with expansion off of planet Earth, who dream of terraforming mars and other planets were to sit in the dark and really deal with their inner pain and inner childhood emotions? Imagine if all the activists calling out all the unfair injustices were to sit and feel the way that their parents made them feel invalidated and unsafe? Considering it is 1 out of 3 girls and 1 out of 5 boys who are molested before the age of 18, think of all the people walking around feeling total unsafety and looking to control the outside world as a way to create an illusion of safety that would be much more effectively achieved by facing the initial trauma and having an uncomfortable good cry while being held by a loving person?
I realize that I still have a deep fear of disappointing adults - even though I technically am one - and I realize that it comes from feeling like if I disappoint someone, I will lose my safety. What I have been doing is reminding myself that those feelings are so valid and feeling that level of fear deeply, and then once it is heard, telling myself all the ways that other people do not determine my safety now. I do.
I realize that anytime I hear a loud sound - whether it is people laughing or a car honking or a leaf blower, I begin to feel anxiety. What I realize is that this Is a hyper vigilant response to avoid danger. When I think about this, I want to isolate the deep assumption that a loud sound equates danger and that I cannot protect myself from danger. Is this still true as an adult?
What if there is a loud sound?
I think this is the first century where we have the technology to produce loud sounds throughout the day so this is still a new thing for our nervous systems to handle so it makes sense that it would feel like an intense alarm and something to hide from.
I remember being a child walking down my very crowded street and a truck backfiring, and not even responding - and I felt a sense of pride that I didn’t respond even though it was shocking to everyone around me. I took my desensitization as a badge of honor but the truth was that I was So affected by these types of noises that I couldn’t handle it, and didn’t feel like anyone would protect me, especially on the streets of Manhattan, where everyone felt so rushed and unsafe.
Until I heal the initial misbelief that nobody will protect me, It makes sense that my brain would go around perceiving every sound as a threat.
It makes sense why I was a perfectionist and so controlled in my emotion and why my voice sounded so many octaves higher and I had ‘vocal fry’ and sounded like the comedian emo Philipps. It was all an attempt at avoiding the pain of feeling too much which was a fear of abandonment or shame.
Now it is up to me to raise myself, which I feel is the necessary foundation for me to really feel safe enough to do anything external.
I now realize what I experienced as a child was Emotional Neglect, and this made me feel extremely unsafe to ask for help since I felt hopeless that anyone would actually want to help me with genuinely kind intentions of care. I assumed everyone who was kind to me had an alterior motive , especially men, since my dad warned me since age 11 that ‘men only want one thing’ (PET LIZARDS…. Just kidding… the other ‘thing’, which I learned to feel was a violation to dread instead of a pleasurable physical connection.)
My parents are extremely charming and funny and bright and can talk about a wide range of interesting topics but the one thing that neither of them could handle was talking about feelings, which is why I learned to cope by shaming myself for feeling things deeply, since it was unwelcome by my parents…..
I remember being in 6th grade (age 11) building a survival bunker in my bedroom closet with food and water and a map. I don’t remember my mother ever reassuring me that she would protect me if there was any kind of catastrophe.
I was left alone in my bunker while my mom did other stuff, never thinking to question the root fears which prompted me to create such a desperate desire for safety.
This I now realize is because my mom couldn’t keep me safe and she couldn’t keep herself safe. She attracted friends, employees and romantic partners who were in one or more ways rude, inappropriate or flirtatious with me in a way where I did not feel safe, and I did not feel like my mom could keep me safe since she was having these people in her life as well, not just me. If the person who is meant to keep you safe can’t even keep themselves safe, what do you do?
You take on the belief that it is your sole responsibility to keep you BOTH safe, and as a child with pre-verbal abilities, this desperate chaotic feeling of safety grasps onto anything that will make it feel safe.
For me, it was constant hyper vigilant worry, as if I was the lighthouse constantly scanning the dark for danger.
I now realize that this is the same mindset I had which was retriggered with the whole threat of mandatory vaccination because it gave me an emotional flashback of feeling unprotected from physical violation and needing to escape without ever remembering that “I am an adult and I can protect myself and speak up for myself and I am not alone.”
I realize now that I absolutely have CPTSD and have literally been afraid of all sounds, surprises, and conflicts, as if they are all equally life and death and that it is up to me to be perfect so as to avoid danger.
THIS is why I have endlessly procrastinated on projects and why, at the first sign of conflict in any of my creative pursuits, have I retreated back into the comfort of unemployment and living “small-ly” in a tiny room, with an animal pet friend as my only source of love (knowing that the pet cannot surprise and yell at me - except for my tiny aquatic frog Mr Sweeney who would wake me up with his romantic serenade croaking at night in his little blue plastic tank, which often times sounded like a broken 90s Nokia cellphone or beeper)
For me, I realize now that it made total sense I developed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder at age 9 because the OCD gave me rituals that I had to perform in order to feel safe. It literally gave me the authoritative formula “If you do this one thing (count your steps, avoid the number 3, avoid the 3rd item on a sale rack, wear certain ‘lucky’ clothing), you will be safe. It was the illogical but necessary re-assurance I needed from an ‘outside force’ that I could guarantee safety for myself and it was in my control, as opposed to feeling completely untethered with no roadmap of self-protection.
I am thankful to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for helping me to have a formula of “safety” and also for helping to distract me of the initial Traumas which untethered me into the overwhelmed child I was and have been this entire 37 years on this planet, even though my exterior has changed and tricked people into thinking I am “an adult”
Now I am finally welcoming all of the anger and pain and fear I felt, and with enough physical energy, emotional tolerance, patience, courageous power, and loving compassion to know that I can handle all the feelings, no matter how big and discordant and unphotogenic they might be.
I realize now that I have held myself and others to standards of ‘perfection’ where, if a friend disappoints me, it triggers a feeling that “this person is no longer safe”. What I misunderstood until now was that both myself and everyone else are allowed and expected to be ‘imperfect’ and the freedom in all this is possible when we remember that ‘perfection’ doesn’t make us ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ - that you can trust an imperfect friend but this trust is only really possible when you stop making other people responsible for your safety. You are now the adult and can remind yourself that you will keep yourself safe now, from now on, forever.
This is clearly an issue that society at large is working on as it relates to ‘cancel culture’…. If someone does one thing imperfectly during their entire life, society seems to deem this person “unsafe” “unloveable” and “bad”, which is probably the way they treat themselves. To “cancel” someone for a tweet they wrote 10 years ago seems extremely unfair as it suggests people are incapable of growth or healing or self-reflection.
I remember being in 6th grade and telling my mom I wanted to slit my wrists and she told me I should just stab the closet door to get out my frustration. I would go into my bedroom with the biggest knife we had and stab the closet door over and over again (the same closet which led to my survival bunker)
I remember my dad hitting his head and fists against a wall until they bled because he was so filled with rage and there being a hole in the wall where he punched things. As I write this, I can’t recall where this was, but I know for sure he told me about this - as if this was just a normal thing that angry people did, with their children present.
I remember my dad fighting with his mother in front of me and my dad threatening to kill himself while he was driving. I was in 5th grade. They then went back to talking normally, as if that was just a normal topic of conversation, like the weather.
It was this same car ride where my dad took me and my grandmother to the supermarket and my grandmother yelled at me and told me I was stupid for putting quarters in the phone booth incorrectly, blaming me that she ran out of change, and that we might be stuck at the supermarket forever because the change in the phone booth was stuck. When I think about that, it is not my fault that the coins got stuck in the phone booth. It was so inappropriate for her to yell at me and make it seem as if we would be trapped at the supermarket forever because of my ‘mistake’ - but as a child, you believe everything goes on forever and everything is your fault.
I told the first part of this series of childhood “memories” (scars) to my friend yesterday and she said that is a form of abuse. When I think about it, it really is so emotionally neglectful to tell a suicidal child to go into their room and play with a big knife unattended. It really just shows that my mother could not handle my big emotions - which further made me ashamed of them - and further made me feel ‘unsafe’ in this world, even with myself.
This suggestion to “go to my room” completely validated that my mother could not make me feel safe, (and that my feelings were to be dealt with alone, almost like a punishment) and so it was up to me, all alone. For the last 37 years I have tried to figure out “why I was so crazy” or a loner or whatnot, and now it is clearer than ever before.
I know my mom really did the best she could, especially considering the abuse she experienced and the unmet needs she had, but as much as I want to make excuses, it still really stings to finally feel the enormity of the unsafety I felt.
I remember us going to Costa Rica for the first time when I was 7 (with a hurtful man she used to date and his son, who has since killed himself, who I have mentioned in previous posts) On this trip, my mom barely spoke any Spanish and I could feel her anxiety while we were in a taxi and I literally began racking my brain for all the Spanish I had learned in kindergarten and 1st grade in my public school to try to protect us. I remember I began speaking to the cab driver in Spanish to tell him where we needed to go. I remember after that, I began having dreams only in Spanish language, and I believe this was my brain trying to ‘practice… (er practicar’) for the day ahead, where I would again be responsible for our safety.
Never once did I feel a reassurance from either of my parents that I was safe, or that they would protect me, on this trip or ever.
This sadly makes sense however as they both are extremely anxious people who were not kept safe by their parents, at all - and often times, emotionally and/or physically abused by their parents or with their parents knowledge. (My dad was physically abused constantly by my grandfather while my grandmother did nothing - and my mom was abused in other ways without anyone stepping in to protect her)
OF COURSE they would carry their own wounding into parenting me - and of course, as a child, I would not understand that this wasn’t “personal” and just believe I deserved to feel this level of anxiety because something was wrong with me.
My mom and I went to Costa Rica 7 times with this man and his son and it was clear that this man disliked me from the beginning. He would compare me and his son and tell me I was stupid for not knowing how to do the NY Times crossword puzzles (which are hard enough for an adult) It was this man who would order the spiciest thing at a Chinese restaurant every Friday night and brag how spicy things didn’t affect his taste buds, all while criticizing me and his son as stupid and lazy.
Thank god for the gluten rich wonton noodles and red sweet dipping sauce I could numb myself with to avoid feeling the intensity of humiliation I felt every Friday at dinner with this man.
I remember going to an amusement park with them and my mom and the son accidentally slamming his hand in the car door, at full speed. I remember the son crying and the dad tickling him to get him to stop crying. This was so abusive and disturbing of the dad to do, as it was a perfect symbol of the way he could not handle his son’s or my emotions. This son would later grow up to be an alcoholic and then kill himself (which I have mentioned in previous posts, especially as it relates to his soul communicating with me to help release him from Limbo, which came to my attention after seeing my doctor last year - did you remember that fun post?)
I remember telling my friend George about this man David and how he would brag about eating spicy food. It was so amazing because George was rightfully shocked at how immature this man was - along with my dad - and I loved having George as an ally and friend because he was 59, about the exact same age as both my dad and David when they were their most critical towards me as a child….. I loved George would imitate David eating spicy ghost peppers and it was just so nice to have an adult man validate that I grew up around unhealthy people, including him, my dad, and my mom.
George was the first friend I have ever had where I felt completely safe and also parented. George would cook me dinner every night and never be burdened by my requests. He told me he loved hearing me cry as much as me laughing and that I should never hide my emotions from him. It literally felt like George has helped me learn what healthy parental love is - but the unhealthy part of it is that George is not my parent, and in fact, wanted more from me than I could give him - to be my life partner and husband.
As much as I will always love George and our incredible friendship, how unhealthy would it be to have a spouse who treats you like a child? How could I have been a mother when I was in such desperate need for a parent, myself? This dynamic which I lovingly and amicably walked away from December 1st is what doctors refer to as ‘codependence’ and I realize that my friendship with George was headed in an unhealthy territory where I was emotionally dependent on him and he was emotionally dependent on *me* being dependent on *him*, as it helped him to avoid his own issues or the fact that he could not be indoors anywhere for more than 10 minutes and would often sleep in a cave in the park (which was a beautiful cave, I should mention).
On my birthday, George and I drove to Palos Verdes which is a beautiful area by the ocean and on the way back home, I had a panic attack (which was the first time in my life) and I could not talk or see straight. It was that day when I decided that something had to change and it was time for me to move out and figure out how to really feel safe no matter where I am (externally) in the world….
This is how I now ended up living in Beverly Hills, finally learning to feel true safety for the first time in my life.
The last 4 days have been a deeper level of grief than I have ever felt, after discovering the concept of ComplexPTSD and how all of my symptoms match up perfectly to those described in the book by Pete Walker on the subject (a book which I was assigned in my new course I am taking)
I feel so angry for being so mad at myself all this time, as if all my emotions were illogical because I did not have a “terrible” childhood, especially compared to my parents.
I did not understand why I am constantly hyper vigilant and always scanning my surroundings for danger and always feeling like I have to protect myself all by myself. OF COURSE I would be constantly afraid if I learned to see the world as unsafe, and learned to think that it was up to me to protect myself with nobody to turn to.
I have a feeling I longed to be famous as if that were to happen, I would finally get my parents unconditional attention, especially since they were both in the entertainment industry. If only I could be famous and rich and successful enough, maybe I would finally have their undivided attention and have all my emotions welcome, right?
I have a feeling I kept avoiding adult responsibilities because deep down, I was hoping that if I got too ‘broke’ enough or too ‘crazy’ enough, my parents would finally come save me. I realize that even though my dad died exactly 4 years ago this month, I have still clung onto the belief that accepting adulthood would guarantee that my parents would not come to my rescue, so I think I avoided it at all costs… waiting for my dead father and emotionally neglectful mother to come rescue me, somehow.
I close my eyes and I imagine my parents and grandparents and aunt and uncle (who would yell with no rhyme or reason) taking me to Riverside Park and gazing into my eyes as if I am the most fascinating lovable baby. It is so amazing to feel their warmth, even when I know it is just a fantasy. I then add in all the kids who bullied me into this circle of loving eyes on me, and I feel my hardened fear layer soften, if even for a moment.
This is really blowing my mind in the best way. I am so glad to have all these realizations for the first time.
I was just lying in bed crying and feeling these deep forgotten feelings and thinking of my dad saying “Hey, it could be bad… or it could be good?” And I was trying to think “What are the good parts of child abuse?”
Part of me thinks that because of my hyper vigilance, one of the good things to come out of it is a sensitivity to micro-facial movements when I sense someone is lying. In the last 10 years, I have increasingly felt a growing mistrust of most people in political power - and this has grown exponentially the more healing I do - and the more corruption that is exposed (Wikileaks was a big turning point for me)
I believe that those children who were raised in trusting safe childhood homes are less likely to believe in paranoid theories that their government is untrustworthy or aiming for depopulation through a variety of means (GMOs, medical mandates, etc)
I honestly wonder if my fear of the government is just an irrational product of my mistrust of my parents - OR if my suspicions are actually VALID and it is BECAUSE of my history of abuse that I know now when to trust my instincts (which are screaming at me that this mandatory vaxx`n8tion is more toxic than it is good)
I really don’t know the answer to that - but I have a big suspicion that the people who are drawn to “conspiracies” grew up in toxic childhood environments where their authority figures (parents/caretakers) could not be relied upon, and it created a blanket judgement against all authority figures…
I remember my parents would taunt me with a robot toy that was extremely scary. They often fought with each other but I feel like them scaring me together was the few times I saw them laughing together. This was when I was about 2 or 3. I remember feeling so helpless that the 2 only people who were supposed to keep me safe were the ones causing me so much pain. Also, by laughing at me for my fears, it caused so much shame on top of my fears.
When I was in 6th grade, I began wondering if I was sexually abused by either my dad, uncle, or grandparent - I felt so unsafe all the time, I did not understand - and the only type of abuse that seemed to warrant this level of fear I walked throughout the day with was child molestation - because I did not have any physical bruises which would suggest physical abuse.
Deep down, I don’t think anyone molested me but I think the series of emotional violations I felt over and over were probably the source of my CPTSD or “scared all the time, especially around men and in public syndrome”
Something I found extremely interesting was the fact that CPTSD is not in the Diagnostic Manual (DSM) which is the master list of all mental disorders. The ‘inventor’ of the term CPTSD said that if the DSM were to acknowledge the role of parental abuse on children, it would completely change the way mental illness is labeled, since most of it stems from abuse or neglect (same thing, I am learning to realize)
This reminds me of the concept of a flood. When there is a flood, it can affect a piece of land differently overtime and cause chaos in different parts of a town. It’s amazing when you see a flood go in very specific directions and you wonder ‘what intelligence caused the flood to go in THIS direction versus that one?’ I am starting to think that trauma and mental illness are very similar. The trauma is the ‘flood water’ and the ‘direction of damage’ is the expressed “mental illness” which can go in lots of different directions and be given arbitrary labels “bipolar/generalized anxiety/OCD” without anyone realizing where the flood water came from.
This also feels relevant in the diagnosis of physical illness.
A family can eat the same processed foods 3x a day for decades and everyone gets a different physical illness later in life. The processed food and it’s toxicity is the equivalent of the “flood waters” and the physical illness is the “direction of the water” - it flows differently for everyone and doctors are focused on the specific ‘direction’ of the flood instead of the water itself. (With trauma/toxicity/environment being 90% of the “flood” and 10% being genetics which make someone pre-disposed to express certain ‘flood directions’)
Censorship from authority figures triggers the part in us that felt suppressed as children and further validates that they cannot be trusted, which makes for a cycle of deeper and deeper mistrust and alienation.
It feels very likely that people who never experienced trauma or health issues would have no reason to suspect there is anything sinister about mandatory vaccination, whereas people who grew up learning to mistrust their family and experiencing chronic health conditions, which made them mistrust their own bodies and think of themselves as broken (even though, we know now that chronic health conditions have a purpose of making a person too tired to deal with the intensity of their pain - so it becomes a protective coping mechanism under the title of ‘sickness’)
Sick people who are told that ‘there is something wrong with them’ who then go onto heal themselves and realize it was their food/environment that was making them sick are very likely the category of people who are mistrusting the government’s suggestion to enforce vaccination.
After all, had they trusted the government/USDA food pyramid, they would have continued trying toxic foods and toxic allopathic medicine which was prescribed as “normal” and giving them terrible results.
It was their walking away from the mainstream which led to positive results, and the validation that “it wasn’t me who was broken, it was the stuff I was putting in or around my body that was”
This type of resurrection is what I have experiencing in all areas of myself, and this most recent milestone about learning about Chronic PTSD feels like the greatest one yet, and I thank God for this.
I have grown a deeper connection with God and my intuition (same thing) BECAUSE of my healing journey, which would have never happened had the pain I was experiencing not been BAD ENOUGH to be forced to deal with…
So in a way, it is my trauma and health issues which connected me with God and for that I am forever thankful because besides myself, God is the only one who can protect me and the only that matters in the big picture (even though everyone I meet is an emanation of God, even all the people who bullied me, and they are all just fulfilling their karmic roles and spiritual curriculums).
As I mentioned in the beginning of this blog entry, my internet is down and how perfect, because I finally had a chance to read the PDF which I downloaded 4 days ago about dealing with emotional flashbacks, which psychotherapist Pete Walker calls ‘prolonged regressions’ and ‘amygdala hijacking’.
It is so in line with what I have written above, it is crazy! Perhaps this will help you too.
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MANAGING EMOTIONAL FLASHBACKS
1. Say to yourself: "I am having a flashback." Flashbacks take us into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as we were in childhood. The feelings and sensations you are experiencing are past memories that cannot hurt you now.
2. Remind yourself: "I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present."
Remember you are now in the safety of the present, far from the danger of the past.
3. Own your right/need to have boundaries.
Remind yourself that you do not have to allow anyone to mistreat you;
you are free to leave dangerous situations and protest unfair behavior.
4. Speak reassuringly to your Inner Child.
The child needs to know that you love her unconditionally– that she can come to you for comfort and protection when she feels lost and scared.
5. Deconstruct eternity thinking.
In childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless—a safer future was unimaginable.
Remember the flashback will pass as it has many times before.
6. Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. (Feeling small and little is a sure sign of a flashback.)
7. Ease back into your body. Fear launches us into "heady" worrying, or numbing and spacing out.
Gently ask your body to relax. Feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. (Tightened musculature sends unnecessary danger signals to the brain.)
Breathe deeply and slowly. (Holding the breath also signals danger.)
Slow down. Rushing presses the psyche's panic button.
Find a safe place to unwind and soothe yourself: wrap yourself in a blanket, hold a stuffed animal, lie down in a closet or a bath, take a nap.
Feel the fear in your body without reacting to it. Fear is just an energy in your body that cannot hurt you if you do not run from it or react self-destructively to it.
8. Resist the Inner Critic's catastrophizing.
(a) Use thought-stopping
to halt its exaggeration of danger and need to control the uncontrollable.
Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself.
Channel the anger of self-attack into saying no to unfair self-criticism.
(b) Use thought-substitution to replace negative thinking with a memorized list of your qualities and accomplishments.
9. Allow yourself to grieve. Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment, and to validate—and then soothe—the child's past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn our tears into self-compassion and our anger into self-protection.
10. Cultivate safe relationships and seek support. Take time alone when you need it, but don't let shame isolate you. Feeling shame doesn't mean you are shameful. Educate those close to you about flashbacks and ask them to help you talk and feel your way through them.
11. Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks.
Avoid unsafe people, places, activities and triggering mental processes.
Practice preventive maintenance with these steps when triggering situations are unavoidable.
12. Figure out what you are flashing back to.
Flashbacks are opportunities to discover, validate and heal our wounds from past abuse and abandonment.
They also point to our still-unmet developmental needs and can provide motivation to get them met.
13. Be patient with a slow recovery process.
It takes time in the present to become un-adrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks.
Real recovery is a gradual process—often two steps forward, one step back. Don't beat yourself up for having a flashback.
Pete Walker
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The timing of all of this information and memories is perfectly in line with the visitation from 3 of my grandparents on February 28th during my last ayuhuasa ceremony.
They all apologizied to me for causing me to be such a worried person.... They all see now that worrying was an illusion they held onto, and they see I am still holding onto it , when it is not actually helpful and made them dislike liviing, just like it oftentimes has made me dislike living, as a prisoner to my anxiety.
I find it fascinating that with every plant medicine I have tried in the past year - marijuana, ayahuasca, mushrooms, 5-meo-DMT, all of them work by forcing my body to relax and get out of the hyperviginalt state. It is there where I receive the most insight and ‘downloads’ of information and cathartic tears and healing.
It makes sense that if I did not feel safe, I could not ‘trick’ my brain to ‘relax’ unless there was some outer force, whether a message from a parent or God that it was 100% safe but since this never happens in such a definitive guaranteed way, it is only through plant medicine I have been able to relax to really heal.
One of the first messages to come through on February 28th was that God loves me and is with me at all times, and always has been and always will be. A part of me then wonders "Why did you allow these terrible things to happen to me? Or war?" and the only thing I can think or feel is that I wouldn't have learned anything I know now if it wasn't for the pain I endured.
I know now that worrying does not stop pain from ever occuring. It robs a person of their present moment way more than a temporary pain ever will.
How beautifully ironic is it that it is most safe and productive not to worry any longer?
