Welcome to the 2nd article on ‘Surviving to Thriving’. In this article we will discuss healing, the ego, mindfulness, emotional healing, emotional intelligence, toxic shame, grieving, spiritual healing, somatic healing, and much more.
There are numerous 1-dimensional approaches to childhood trauma that bill themselves as cure-alls, including elements of psychotherapy. Singular approaches are unable to address all the levels of wounding that combined to cause CPTSD. Moreover, working with simplistic approaches can leave you stranded in toxic shame when you do not achieve the touted results. The articles in my series, based on the book by Pete Walker 'Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving', aim to unlock your Self from being what Alice Miller called a “Prisoner of childhood.”
Abusive and abandoning parents can injure and abandon us on many levels: Cognitive; emotional; spiritual; physical; and relational. In order to recover you need to learn how to support your Self to meet your unmet developmental needs on each level that is relevant to your experience of childhood trauma. There are many tasks involved in CPTSD recovery.
The road to recovery
Key developmental arrests in CPTSD
What follows is a list of some of the most common developmental arrests that occur in CPTSD. You may find that you experienced a diminishment or absence of these key features of a healthy human being. Typically, survivors will vary on which and how many of these arrests relate to them. Factors affecting this are your 4F type, your childhood abuse neglect pattern, your innate nature, and any recovery work that you have already accomplished.
Self-acceptance, a clear sense of identity, self-compassion, self-protection, the capacity to draw comfort from relationships, the ability to relax, capacity for full self-expression, willpower, and motivation, peace of mind, self-care, belief that life is a gift, self-esteem, and self-confidence, all aid our recovery. Our efforts to nurture ourselves and these arrested areas of development are limited and spoiled in early recovery by a feeling of resentment following CPTSD. “Why do I have to do this?” is a common internal refrain. Resentment that should have been directed toward our parents often boomerangs on to us and spoils or thwarts our efforts at self-nurturance. Thankfully, ongoing recovery work helps to remedy this resentment teaches us to practise self-care in a spirit of giving to a child who needs and really deserves to be helped.
It’s helpful to approach self-care from the viewpoint of novelist David Mitchell's quip that “Fire is the sun unwinding itself out of the wood.” Similarly effective recovery is unwinding the natural potential you were born with, without your unconscious. This is your innate potential which may be as yet unrealised because of your childhood trauma. Especially tragic developmental arrest that afflicts many survivors is the loss of their willpower and self-motivation. Many dysfunctional parents react destructively to their child's budding sense of initiative. If this occurs throughout his childhood the survivor may feel lost and purposeless in his life: He may drift through his whole life, function without a motor, and moreover, even when he manages to identify a goal of his own choosing he may struggle to follow through with extended and concentrated effort.
Remedying this developmental arrest is essential because many new psychological studies now show that persistence, even more than intelligence or innate talent, is the key psychological characteristic necessary for finding fulfilment in life. The ability to invoke willpower seems to be allied to your ability to helpfully express your anger. With sufficient recovering you can learn to manufacture your volition. In the beginning, you can ‘fake it until you make it.’ This is what Steven Johnson calls "The hard work miracle". Some survivors have confidence but not self-esteem. In childhood my own flight response got channelled into acquiring academic skills for which the outside world rewarded me but the benefit of these rewards never penetrated my toxic shame enough to allow me to feel that I was a worthwhile person. My inner critic, like my parents, always found something flawed in me to contradict the feedback. That I was getting 99% on the test was never a cause for pride, rather it was the impetus for a great deal of self-criticism about the missing 1%. Like many other survivors that I have worked with I developed the’ impostor syndrome’, which contradicted the outside positive feedback that I was receiving. It insisted that if people really knew me they would see what a loser I was. My self esteem was still abysmal, despite my achievements.
Cognitive healing
Cognitive healing - the first level of recovery, usually involves repairing the damage that CPTSD wreaks on our thoughts and beliefs about ourselves. Cognitive recovery work aims to make your brain user-friendly: It focuses on recognising and illuminating the destructive thoughts and thinking processes you were indoctrinated with in childhood. 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.
We need to understand exactly how appallingly our 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.
We can redirect this blame to our parents’ dreadful child rearing practices, and we can also do this in a way that motivates us to reject their influence so that we can freely orchestrate our journey of recovering. This work then requires us to build a fierce allegiance to ourselves. Such loyalty strengthens us for the cognitive work of freeing our brains from being conditioned to attack so many normal parts of our selves. Cognitive work is fundamental to helping you disidentify from the self-hating critic.
Shrinking the critic
Early abuse and abandonment force 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. Persevering on finding a formula to win over her parents, the child eventually embraces perfectionism as a strategy to make her parents less dangerous (they are our 'monsters') and more engaging. Her one hope is that if she becomes smart, helpful, pretty, and flawless enough, her parents will finally care for her. Sadly, continued failure at winning their regard forces her to conclude that she is fatally flawed. She is loveless not because of her mistakes but because she is a mistake. This is the nature of toxic shame. She can only see what is wrong with or missing in her. This is how I felt, regardless of the accolades, exams, achievements, awards, higher degrees, and quality of my work.
Anything she does, says, thinks, imagines, or feels has the potential to spiral her down into a depressed abyss of fear and toxic shame. Her superego fledges into a full-blown trauma-inducing inner critic. Self-criticism then runs non-stop in a desperate attempt to avoid rejection inducing mistakes. Catastrophising then 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. The survivor becomes imprisoned by a gaoler who will accept nothing but perfection. She is chauffeured by a hysterical driver who sees nothing but danger in every turn of the road.
The developmentally arrested healthy ego
Over time the critic becomes more and more synonymous with the survivor’s identity. The superego morphs into a totalitarian inner critic that trumps the development of a healthy ego (what I have called the Higher Power, or Higher Self, or true Self, in all my previous articles). This Higher Power develops later than the superego. I believe that in reality we are born with a Higher Power, which then gets conditioned out of us by our parents and society, until we have a reason to wake it up again. Your Higher Power is who you truly are - your identity. The healthy ego (Higher Power) is the user-friendly manager of the psyche. Unfortunately, CPTSD inducing parents stunt the growth of the Higher Power by undermining the development of the crucial egoic 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, express yourself, or stand up for yourself. The instinct to care for yourself and to protect yourself against unfairness is then forced to become dormant.
Psychoeducation and cognitive healing
Becoming psychoeducated about CPTSD is the first level of addressing this poisonous indoctrination of your mind against your healthy ego (Higher Power). When you fully 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. Without a properly functioning Higher Power you have no centre for making conscious healthy choices and decisions. All too often your decisions are based on the fear of getting in trouble or getting abandoned rather than on the principles of having meaningful and equitable interactions with the world.
You can learn to gradually replace the critic's toxic perspective with a viewpoint that supports you in your life and that stops you from unnecessarily scaring your Self. I threw my inner critic into a bush on a beautiful walk in nature. You are free now as an adult to develop peace of mind and a supportive relationship with your Self. A Self-championing stance can transform your existence from struggling survival to a fulfilling sense of thriving.
You can begin right now by inviting your instincts of self-compassion and self-protection to awaken and bloom in your life. Cognitive healing may have begun or been reinforced by listening to what has preceded this: Hopefully you are having some epiphanies about what is at the core of your suffering. Some readers may have been searching for cognitive answers for years and through their reading and therapy have already created a sizeable foundation for doing this work. At the same time those who have only tried a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) approach to healing their trauma may feel great resistance to hearing that cognitive work is important. You may have been introduced to it in a way that promised more than could be delivered. Cognitive tools are irreplaceable in healing cognitive issues but they do not address all the levels of our wounding. They are especially limited in addressing emotional issues as we will hear later in early recovery, the psychoeducation piece of cognitive work typically comes from the wisdom of others. Teachers, writers, friends, other connections, and therapists who are more informed on this subject than we are. This brings in the role of the Enlightened Witness. When psychoeducation reaches its most powerful level of effectiveness however it begins to morph into mindfulness.
Mindfulness
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 (neither of these first two are a good idea), express it, or just feel it until it changes into something else?"
Mindfulness is a perspective that weds your capacity for self-observation with your instinct of self-compassion. It is therefore your ability to observe yourself from an objective and self-accepting viewpoint. It is a key feature of the helpfully developed Higher Self and is sometimes described as the ‘observing ego’ or the ‘witnessing Self’. Mindfulness is a perspective of benign curiosity about all of your inner experience. Recovery is enhanced immeasurably by developing this helpful process of introspection. As it becomes more developed, mindfulness can be used to recognise and disidentify from beliefs and viewpoints that you acquired from your traumatising family. One cannot overstate the importance of becoming aware of your inner Self commentary. With enough practise mindfulness eventually awakens your fighting spirit to resist the abusive refrains from your childhood and to replace them with thoughts that are Self-supportive. Mindfulness also helps you to establish a perspective from which you can assess and guide your own efforts of recovering. Finally it is important to note that mindfulness tends to develop and expand in a progressive manner to all levels of our experience: Cognitive, emotional, physical, and relational. Mindfulness is essential for guiding us at every level of recovering. In my experience, I could not agree more. I have discussed mindfulness in my article about meditation.
Emotional healing
Traumatising parents do as much damage to our emotional natures as they do to our thinking processes. Consequently, there is a great deal of recovery work that needs to be done on this level. This is especially true because of the damage our wider society also does to our emotional natures.
Recovering the emotional nature
The survivor who is seeking a healthy relationship with his emotional being will strive to accept the existential fact that the human feeling nature is often contradictory and frequently vacillates between opposite polarities of feeling experiences. It is quite normal for feelings to change unpredictably along continuum's that stretch between a variety of emotional polarities. A such it is especially human and healthy to have shifts of mood between such extremes as happy and sad, enthused and depressed, loving and angry, trusting and suspicious, brave and afraid, and forgiving and blaming.
Unfortunately, in this culture, only the positive polarity of any emotional experience is approved or allowed. This can cause such an avoidance of the negative polarity that at least two different painful conditions result. In the first, the person injuries and exhausts himself and compulsively attempts to avoid a disavowed feeling, and actually becomes more stuck in it this is like the archetypal clown who’s frantic efforts to free himself from a piece of flypaper leave him more immobilised and entangled. In the second, repression of one end of the emotional continuum often leads to repression of the whole continuum. The person becomes emotionally deadened. The baby of emotional vitality is thrown out with the bathwater of some unacceptable feeling. A reluctance to participate in such a fundamental realm of the human experience results in much unnecessary loss.
For just as without night there is no day, without work there is no play, without hunger there is no satiation, without fear there is no courage, without tears there is no joy, and without anger there is no real love.
Most people who choose, or are coerced, into only identifying with positive feelings usually wind up in an emotionally lifeless middle ground. They feel deadened and disassociated in an unemotional ‘no man's land’. Moreover, when a person tries to hold onto a preferred feeling for longer than its actual tenure she often appears as unnatural and phony as ersatz fake grass or plastic flowers. If instead she learns to surrender willingly to the normal human experience that good (and bad) feelings always ebb and flow she will eventually be graced with a growing ability to renew herself in the vital waters of emotional flexibility.
The repression of the so-called negative polarities of emotion causes much unnecessary pain, as well as the loss of many essential aspects of the feeling nature. Much of the plethora of loneliness, alienation, disconnection, and addictive distraction that plagues modern industrial societies is a result of people being taught and forced to reject, pathologise, or punish so many of their own and others normal feeling states. Nowhere, not in the deepest recesses of the Self, or in the presence of his closest friends, is the average person allowed to have and explore any number of normal emotional states. Anger, depression, envy, sadness, fear, distrust, etc. are all as normal part of life as water, bread, and flowers. Yet, they have become as ubiquitously avoided as shameful human experiences. How tragic this, is for all of these emotions have enormously important and healthy functions in a wholly integrated, authentic, and healthy psyche.
One dimension where this is most true is in the arena of healthy self-protection. 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. 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. Perhaps never more before has humankind been so alienated from so many of its normal feeling states as it is in the 21st century. Never before have so many human beings been so emotionally deadened and impoverished. The disease of emotional emaciation is epidemic. Its effect on our mental health is often euphemistically labelled as stress, and like the emotions, stress is often treated like some unwanted waste that must be removed. Until all the emotions are accepted indiscriminately, and acceptance does not imply a licence to dump emotions irresponsibly or abusively, there can be no wholeness, no real sense of wellbeing, and no solid sense of self-esteem. While it may be easy to like yourself when feelings of love, joy, or serenity are present, deeper psychological health is seen only when you can maintain a posture of self-love and self-respect in the times of emotional hurt that accompany life's inevitable contingencies of loss, loneliness, confusion, uncontrollable unfairness, and accidental mistake. The human feeling experience much like the weather is often unpredictably changeable. No positive feeling can be induced to persist as a permanent experience. No matter what cognitive behavioural therapy tells us, and as disappointing as this may be, as much as we might like to deny it, as much as it causes each of us ongoing life frustration, and as much as we were raised and continued to be reinforced for trying to control and pick our feelings, they are still by definition of the human condition largely outside the providence of our wills.
Emotional intelligence
Daniel Goldman defines emotional intelligence as our ability to successfully recognise and manage our own feelings and to helpfully respond to the feelings of others. The quality of our emotional intelligence is reflected in the degree to which we accept all of our feelings without automatically dissociating from them or expressing them in a way that hurts ourselves or others.
When we are emotionally intelligent, we also extend this acceptance to our intimates. This is the hallmark of ‘real-ationships ‘. Another way of saying this is that I have self-esteem to the degree that I keep my heart open to myself in all my emotional states and that I have intimacy when my friend and I offer this type of emotional acceptance to each other. Once again, this does not condone destructive expressions of anger which are of course counterproductive to trust and intimacy. CPTSD engendering parents often hypocritically attack their children's emotional expression in a bimodal 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. Most traumatising parents are especially contemptuous towards the child's expression of emotional pain: This contempt then forces the child's all important capacity for healthy grieving into developmental arrest. One archetypal example of this is seen in the parent who hurts his child to the point of tears and then has the nerve to say “Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about.” We do not get angry back as it is seen as a capital crime that would elicit the most savage retaliation. Typically, it would be delivered with homicidal rage. This 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 emotional abandoning parent who sequesters the child in a time-out for crying or routinely retreats from the crying child into her room. The worst most damaging example of this occurs when this is done to the preverbal toddler or baby who only has emotions with which to express herself. Preverbal children are by definition far too young to learn the two to three-year olds developmental task of using her words to communicate about her feelings. An especially nasty form of emotional abuse occurs and the traumatising family when the child is even attacked for displays of pleasant emotion. As I write about this I flashback to scenes of my mother locking my brother in our dark cellar with the lights off under a trap door for being too excited and leaving him there, pulling a carpet over the trap door to muffle his cries and petrified screams. Emotional abuse is also almost always accompanied by emotional abandonment which can most simply be described as a relentless lack of parental warmth and love. 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, let alone love them.
Toxic shame and soul murder
The rejecting responses of our parents to our emotional expression alienate us from our feelings. Emotional abuse and neglect scare us out of our own emotions while simultaneously making us terrified of other people's feelings.
John Bradshaw describes the devastation of the child's emotional nature as ‘soul murder’. He explains this as involving a process where the child's emotional expression is the first language of self-expression and is so assaulted with disgust that any emotional experience immediately devolves into toxic shame. Toxic shame is the effect of the inner critic and inner critic thought processes are the conditions of shame. This is a terrible yin-yang process emanating from our original abandonment because of the deadly 1-2 punch of familial and societal attacks on our emotional selves - we need to recover our innate emotional intelligence. This is also deeply important because, as Carl Jung emphasised, our emotions tell us what is really important to us. 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. As emotional recovery progresses the mindfulness described before 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. Such emotional development illuminates our own natural preferences and in turn aids us in making easier and better choices.
Grieving as emotional intelligence
Grieving is the key process for reconnecting with our repressed emotional intelligence. Grieving reconnects us with our full complement of feelings. Grieving is necessary to help us release and work through our pain about the terrible losses of our childhoods. These losses are like deaths of parts of ourselves and grieving can often initiate their rebirths.
Grieving and verbal ventilation
Grieving restores our crucial developmentally arrested capacity to verbally ventilate. Verbal ventilation is the penultimate grieving practise. It is speaking from your feelings in a way that releases and resolves your emotional distress. The following description of a six panel cartoon visually conveys the powerful transformative power of verbal ventilation. In the first panel of the wordless cartoon a woman with a dark cloud over her head is talking to a friend who has a shining son of hers. In panel two, the first woman gestures in a way that indicates complaining, the cloud covers her friend's son. In the third panel the cloud emits a bolt of lightning as she angrily purges, and her friend glowers along with her. In panel four the cloud reigns on the as they embrace, commiserating in the reign of their shared tears. In panel five relief spreads over their faces as the cloud moves away from the sun. In panel six the sun shines over both of them as they smile and slip into pleasant conversation. This cartoon reflects the fully realised power of verbal ventilation which is the key bonding process in intimacy. It is also the key healing process of effective therapy.
And here is an example of what verbally ventilating looks like in the therapy session. A client arrives in flashback and in pain: He verbally ventilates about it - he is his regressed inner child feeling bad and part of him is sad and part of him is mad. He is once again lost in the painful feelings of his original abandonment and the state is like a death that responds well to grieving. As he lets his feelings come into his voice he talks, cries, and angers out as pain. Though this processing of his pain he then gradually moves out of his flashback. He is restored to his normal everyday sense that he is no longer trapped in his traumatic childhood. Relief about this returns him to his normal ability to cope. If his grieving is deep enough, he customarily feels more hopeful and light-hearted. Not infrequently his sense of humour resurfaces, and laughter punctuates his continuing verbal ventilation. This laughter is usually much different than the sarcastic humorous laughter of his critic that he might have begun the session with. The inner critic is sometimes so hostile to grieving that shrinking the critic may need to be your first or recovery priority. Until the critic is sufficiently tamed, grieving can actually make flashbacks worse, other than to perform the restorative processes it alone can initiate. Clients =may be so traumatised around grieving that it requires spending many months working on the cognitive level before grieving is released from the spoiling effects of the toxic critic.
Spiritual healing
Soothing abandonment losses via a higher sense of belonging: Spiritual beliefs are of course the subject of personal and sometimes private concern. The aim is to point out psychological concepts that have a non-sectarian spiritual aspect. A key aspect of the abandonment depression in CPTSD is the lack of a sense of belonging to humanity, life, anyone, or anything. I've met many survivors whose first glimmer of belonging came to them on a quest that began as a spiritual pursuit. Finding nothing but betrayal in the realm of humans they turned to the spiritual for help. Spiritual pursuits are sometimes fuelled by an unconscious hope of finding a sense of belonging. The worst thing that can happen to a child is to be unwelcomed in his family of origin, to never feel included. Moreover, many survivors have little or no experience of any social arena that feels safe and welcoming.
Many survivors also do not find a sense of belonging in traditional or organised religions. Finding conventional religion too reminiscent of their dysfunctional families, some survivors look to more solitary spiritual approaches. They find a sense of belonging to something larger and more comforting by reading spiritual books or engaging in meditative practises. This also allows them to bypass the danger of direct human contact. Other survivors have spiritual experiences of belonging to something greater and worthwhile by being in nature, by listening to music, or by appreciating the arts. I once marvelled at a book whose title now eludes me that was a compendium of quotes from many renowned people who had numinous experiences through the direct perception of nature's beauty. This experience is a powerful moving feeling of wellbeing accompanied by a sense that there is a positive benign force behind the Universe as well as within your Self. This in turn sometimes brings enough Grace with it that you have a profound feeling that you are essentially worthwhile, that you belong in this life, and that life is a gift.
Spiritual moments can be breathtakingly beautiful, feeling like experiencing this moment with all of our senses, not having known that it was possible to be so much in our body. The gratitude feeling is deep and profound when it occurs: It feels like a moment of connection to life itself on the deepest level and all life circumstances and what we deem as problems pale to insignificance in those moments. There is only love in its purest form. It truly feels like a blessing, albeit sometimes fleeting, but gives enough sustenance to continue the journey into permanent bliss. Whatever the source, spiritual and numinous experiences, sometimes provide the survivor with their first sense of belonging to something bigger and essentially good. Such experiences can lead a survivor to an author, speaker, fellow traveller, or an Enlightened Witness with similar sensibilities. In other words (as an interpretation of the Finnish term) the experienced experiencer. Sometimes a door opens for finding comfort with a fellow human. Eventually this may even grow into a sense that there are some humans out there who are good and safe enough to engage with.
Somatic healing
Trauma takes its toll on the body in many ways. We need to comprehend the physical damage that CPTSD wreaks on our bodies in order to motivate us to adopt practises that help us to heal on this level. Most of the physiological damage occurs because we're forced to spend so much time in hyperarousal, stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode and we are chronically stressed out and stuck in our sympathetic nervous system activation, with detrimental stomatic changes that become ingrained in our bodies. Here are some of the most common examples of body harming reactions to CPTSD stress: Hypervigilance, shallow and incomplete breathing, constant visualisation, chronic muscle tightness, wear and tear from rushing and armouring, inability to be fully present, inability to be relaxed and grounded in our bodies, sleep problems from being over-activated, digestive disorders from a tightened digestive tract, and physiological damage from excessive self medication with alcohol food or drugs. Moreover, in cases of physical and sexual abuse our capacities to be physically comforted by touch are compromised. And in cases of verbal and emotional abuse our capacities to be comforted by eye and voice contact are undeveloped or seriously diminished.
Somatic self-help
The good news is that some somatic repair happens automatically when we reduce our physiological stress by more efficient flashback management. Particularly potent help also comes from the grieving work of reclaiming the ability to cry self-compassionately and to express anger assertively and self-protectively without the need for aggression. Both processes can release armouring, promote embodiment, improve sleep, decrease hyperarousal, and encourage deeper and more rhythmic breathing. Without further expressly somatic work, however, a fully relaxed inhabitancy of your body may not be achieved. Fortunately, there are other modes of self-help for healing the physiological wounds of CPTSD. Somatic mindfulness and introspective somatic work can help you to decrease adrenalisation and nervous system dysregulation, and to relax more.
Another especially helpful semantic practise is stretching or yoga. Regular systematic stretching of the body's major muscle groups can help you to reduce the armouring that occurs when your 4F responses are chronically triggered. This results from the fact that 4F activation tightens and contracts your body in anticipation of the need to fight back, flee, get small to escape notice, or rev up to launch into people-pleasing activity. Learning to stretch may be a major ordeal if there is extreme body armouring.
Sometimes, with task of self-nurturing, we may resent them intensely and it may take a long time to adopt stretching as a regular practise, for example during yoga, which also has the benefit of meditation and breathing practices. Initially one needs to drop many toxic shame attacks because we are the least flexible person in the group. Yoga is not a competition, you will see rapid improvements in your flexibility, and it’s a beautiful life-changing practice, not a chore. I do yoga with my eyes closed so that I am not comparing myself to others in the group. Persistent practise gives you results that you cannot discount. We are also rewarded by the resolution of decades old back and neck problems from poor posture. It rejuvenates your balance, posture, and flexibility. Yoga has become for me a true labour of love and self-nurturance. Yoga, massage, meditation and relaxation training are formalised disciplines to aid in letting go of unnecessary body tension. For online somatic recovery yoga please click here. Reasonably priced classes in these modalities are usually available in most communities or can be found on Zoom. Finally, freeze types and freeze subtypes also typically benefit from various types of movement therapy and aerobic exercise regimes.
Moreover, assertiveness training and anger release work are especially helpful for survivors who have difficulty accessing their assertiveness or instincts of self-protection.
CPTSD and somatic therapy
There are also various somatic therapies that can help our bodies heal. One must be wary of somatic approaches that claim to heal CPTSD without working on the cognitive and emotional levels described before. 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. Nonetheless, some somatic therapists can ease the physiological traumas that are locked in our bodies as long as the practitioner is not actively dismissing or impeding the clients cognitive and emotional work. In this vein, techniques like EMDR (eye movement desensitisation reprocessing) and somatic experiencing are very powerful tools for stress reduction and calming nervous system dysregulation.
Somatic techniques can also be very helpful in aiding the recovery of the ability to therapeutically emote both tears and anger. They are especially helpful in resolving simple PTSD. However they are not complete CPTSD therapies unless the practitioner is eclectic and wise enough to be incorporating inner critic, inner child, and grieving the losses of childhood work.
Wishing you a joyful and peaceful recovery from CPTSD.
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.