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Grieving Childhood Trauma

Updated: Jan 29

I am writing this article in service to you, as it is particularly pertinent to my week, as my mother has gone into a coma and will die very soon. She was the main cause of my childhood traumas.


Have you grieved the loss of the parts of your Self that were lost as a result of your childhood trauma? These parts became hidden in your shadow and subconsciously drove your behaviour. Grieving is an essential process, in order to revive those parts of you, and make you whole and authentic again.


Here is my experience, as well as reference to the brilliant book on complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) by Pete Walker 'Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving', which is in my Suggested Reading List for your own healing and recovery.


Your inner child and grief over your lost parts - these will be rekindled


Grieving is an irreplaceable tool for resolving the overwhelming feelings that arise during emotional flashbacks. Moreover, grieving is the key process for working through the host of losses that come from growing up in a complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD)-inducing family. 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 article we describe the healing that is available through the four practises of grieving:


1.        Angering

2.        Crying

3.        Verbal ventilating

4.        Feeling


If you find crying or angering do not help or they make you feel worse, then your recovery work may need to focus more on deconstructing and shrinking your inner critic.


Grieving expands insight and understanding

The Persian poet, Sufi philosopher, and Muslim scholar Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, wrote:


I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out:

“It tastes sweet doesn’t it?”

“You have caught me,” Grief answered, “And you’ve ruined my business. How can I sell sorrow, when you know it’s blessing?”

 

Insight, as crucially important as it is, is never enough to attain the deeper levels of recovering. No amount of intention or epiphany can bypass the survivor’s need to learn to lovingly care for himself when he is in an emotional flashback. It is crucial that we respond to ourselves with kindness and gentleness when we are feeling scared, sad, or mad. Grieving aids the survivor immeasurably to work through the death-like experience of being lost and trapped in an emotional flashback. Grieving metabolises our most painful abandonment feelings especially those that give rise to suicidal ideation, and at their worse, active suicidality.


 

Recoverees also need to grieve the death of their early attachment needs. We must grieve the awful fact that safety and belonging was scarce or non-existent in our own families. We need to mourn the myriad heartbreaks of our frustrated attempts to win approval and affection from our parents. Grieving also supports recovery from the many painful death-like losses caused by childhood traumatisation. Key childhood losses are the crucial developmental arrests that we suffered. The most essential of these are the deaths of our self-compassion and our self-esteem. As well as our abilities to protect ourselves, and fully express ourselves through vulnerability and authenticity.


Grieving the absence of parental care

As our capacity to grieve evolves we typically uncovered a great deal of unresolved grief about the deadening absence of the nurturance we needed to develop and thrive. Here are the key types of parental nurturing that all children need in order to flourish. Knowing about these unmet needs can help you to grieve out the unreleased pain that comes from having grown up without this type of support. Moreover, this knowledge can guide you to reparent and interact with yourself more nurturingly:


1.        Verbal nurturance: Eager participation in multidimensional conversation; generous amounts of praise and positive feedback; willingness to entertain all questions; teaching; reading stories; providing resources for ongoing verbal development.

2.        Spiritual nurturance: Seeing and reflecting back to the child his or her essential worth, basic goodness, and loving nature; engendering experiences of joy, fun, and love to maintain the child's innate sense that life is a gift; spiritual or philosophical guidance to help the child integrate painful aspects of life; nurturing the child's creative self-expression; and frequent exposure to Nature.

3.        Emotional nurturance: Meeting the child consistently with caring regard and interest; welcoming and valuing the child's full emotional expression; modelling non-abusive expression of emotions; teaching safe ways to release anger that do not hurt the child or others; generous amounts of love, warmth, tenderness, and compassion; honouring tears as a way of releasing hurt; being a safe refuge; and humour.

4.        Physical nurturance: Affection and protection; healthy diet and sleep schedule; teaching habits of responsibility; helping the child develop hobbies, outside interests, and own sense of personal style; helping the child balance rest, play, and work.


It is often difficult to become motivated to grieve losses that occurred so long ago. Many of these losses seemed so nebulous that to embrace grieving is a bit like trying to embrace dental work. Who wants to go to the dentist? But who doesn't go once the toothache becomes acute? Soul-ache is considerably harder to assign to the losses of childhood. Yet those who take the grieving journey come to know unquestionably that the core of their soul-ache and psychological suffering is in the unworked through losses of growing up with abandoning parents. These losses have to be grieved until the person really gets how much her caretakers were not caretakers. And how much her parents were not her allies or even really loved ones. She needs to grieve until she stops blaming herself for their abuse and or neglect. It’s not your fault! She needs to fully realise that their abysmal parenting practises gave her that awful 'gift that keeps on giving': CPTSD. She needs to grieve until she understands how her learned habit of automatic self-abandonment is a re-enactment of their abject failure to be there for her. Mourning these awful realities empowers our efforts to develop a multi-dimensional practise of self-care. As we grieve more affectively our capacities for self-compassion and self-protection grow and our psyche becomes increasingly user-friendly.


Grieving ameliorates flashbacks

“Pain is excess energy crying out for release” (Gerald Heard). Grieving sometimes seems sacramental in its ability to move us out of the abandonment melange. The abandonment melange is the extremely painful and upsetting amalgam of fear, shame and depression that is at the emotional core of most flashbacks. A survivor can learn to grieve himself out of fear: “The death of feeling safe.” He can learn to grieve himself out of shame: “The death of feeling worthy.” He can learn to grieve himself out of depression: “The death of feeling fully alive.” With sufficient grieving the survivor gets that he was innocent and imminently and unconditionally lovable as a child. As he mourns the bad luck of not being born to loving parents he finds within himself a fierce, unshakable, self-allegiance. He becomes ready, willing, and able to be there for him Self no matter what he is experiencing. This reminds me of the existential philosopher's quote (Albert Camus):


Albert Camus and pushing back with invincibility


Grief work also releases you from the impatience and frustration that can arise when you get re-stuck in an inner critic attack. This is especially important during those monster flashbacks when the critic can bully you into wanting to give up. At such times, angering and crying at this terrible intrusion from your past can rescue you from forgetting how far you have come and how much safer you are now.


Inner critic hindrances to healing

The greatest hindrance to effective grieving is the Inner Critic. When the critic is especially toxic, grieving may be counterproductive and contraindicated in early recovery. Those who were repeatedly pathologised and punished for emoting in childhood may experience grieving as exacerbating their flashbacks rather than relieving them. Tears may immediately trigger you into toxic shame. Your own potentially soothing tears elicits terrible self-attacks: “I’m so pathetic! No wonder nobody can stand me!.” “God, I’m so unlovable when I snivel like this!” “I fu*k up, and then make myself more of a loser by whining about it!” “What good is crying for yourself – it only makes you weaker!” This latter response is particularly ironic, for once grieving is protected from the critic, nothing can restore the individual’s inner strength and coping capacity like a good cry.


Psychotherapists have defused active suicidality on dozens of occasions by simply eliciting the client’s tears. We can help people out of flashbacks by helping them to cry. Critic management is often the primary work of early stage recovery. Once the critic has been sufficiently diminished and once thought correction techniques have made the psyche more user-friendly, the individual begins to tap into grief’s sweet relief-granting potential. She learns to grieve in a way that promotes and enhances compassion for the abandoned child she was and for the survivor she is today – still frequently struggling in the throes of flashbacks.



Defuelling the critic through grieving

Fear drives the toxic inner critic. The critic feeds off fear and flashes the survivor back to the frightening times of childhood. He gets stuck seeing himself only through his parents’ contemptuous, intimidating or rejecting eyes. He mirrors them and scornfully mocks himself as “defective”, “ugly”, “unlovable”.


He scares himself with endangerment scenarios and abhors himself for insignificant imperfections. Because fear is a core emotional experience, emotional tools are needed to manage the fright that runs haywire during a flashback. Healthy angering and crying can short-circuit fear from morphing into the flashback-triggering cognitions of the critic. We have seen grieving bring the critic’s devastating programs of drasticising and catastrophising to a screeching halt. It appears to us that children are wired to release fear through angering and crying. The newborn baby, mourning the death of living safely and fully contained inside the mother, utters the first of many angry cries not only to call for nurturance and attention, but also to release her fear. In the dysfunctional family however, the traumatising parent soon punishes the child for emoting. The child becomes afraid and ashamed of her own tears and anger. Tears get shut off and anger gets trapped inside and is eventually turned against the self as self-attack, self-hate, self-disgust, and self-rejection. Self-hate is the most grievous reenactment of parental abandonment. Over time, anger also becomes fuel for the critic and actually exacerbates fear by creating an increasingly dangerous internal environment. Anything the survivor says, thinks, feels, imagines, or wishes for is subjected to an intimidating inner attack by the critic, which eventually morphs into a first person voice: “Why did I ask such a stupid question?” “Could I have had an uglier expression on my face?” “Who am I kidding? How could an undeserving loser like me wish for love?” “No wonder I feel like shit; I am a piece of shit!” Recovery is enhanced immeasurably by co-opting this anger from the critic and using it for self-protection, and for the work of distancing from and shrinking the critic. Let us now explore how the four processes of grieving: Angering, Crying, Verbally Ventilating and Feeling are so central to ameliorating CPTSD.


1. Angering diminishes fear and shame

Angering is the grieving technique of aggressively complaining about current or past losses and injustices. Survivors need to anger - sometime rage - about the intimidation, humiliation or neglect that was passed off to them as nurturance in their childhoods. As they become adept at grieving, they anger out their healthy resentment at their family’s pervasive lack of safety – at the ten thousand betrayals of no-one-to-go-to for guidance or protection, no one to appeal to for fairness or appreciative recognition of their developmental achievements. Angering is therapeutic when the survivor rails against childhood trauma, and especially when she rails against its living continuance in the self-hate processes of the critic. Angrily saying “No!” or “Shut Up!” to the critic, the proxy of her parents, externalises the anger. It stops her from turning her anger against herself, and allows her to revive the lost instinct of defending herself against unjust attack. Moreover, it rescues her from toxic shame, as it reverses Erik Eriksen’s famous equation: “Shame is blame turned against the Self.” Angering redirects blame where it belongs. Angering can be done alone or in the presence of a validating Enlightened Witness, such as a trusted, experienced friend or therapist. Over time the vast majority of angering needs to be done silently in the privacy of one’s own psyche, as one learns to recognise and respond to inner critic attack with self-protective, anger-empowered thought-stopping. 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 egoic function of self-protection. Until then, they typically derive little benefit from practicing the more subtle techniques of critic-management that are practiced in many Psychodynamic and Mindfulness approaches. 'Embracing Your Inner Critic' by Stone & Stone describes many of these techniques, which can be helpful in later recovery, once the virulent, totalitarian voice of the inner critic has been sufficiently quelled. Angering also serves to rescue the individual from the childlike sense of powerlessness he is flashing back to. It reminds him that he inhabits an adult body and has greater capacity for self-protection than he did as a child. As such, angering serves to antidote or reduce fear. It reawakens and nurtures the instinct of self-protection. With practice it increasingly builds a sense of both outer and inner boundaries – safety from the bullying of others and safety from the most damaging bully of all – the inner critic. Finally, angering can also empower the myriad thought corrections and substitutions needed to establish the survivor’s belief in her own essential goodness and in the lovability of discriminately chosen others. Angering bolsters her for the long-term, gradual process of wrestling her self-image away from the critic and reeducating the psyche to make it both user- and intimacy-friendly.


Angering helps deconstruct repetition compulsion. Until the survivor reconnects with his instinctual anger about the abusive and neglectful behaviours that his parents forbade him to complain about, he risks blindly accepting others’ reenactments of these behaviours.


2. Crying: The penultimate soother In grieving

Crying is the yin complementary process to the yang process of angering. When we are hurt, we instinctively feel sad as well as mad. The newborn child, hurt by the loss of the perfect security of the womb, howls an angry cry. As we learn to grieve effectively, we allow ourselves to mourn about the dearth of positive parental attention in our childhoods. We feel sorrow about the horrible reality that parental attention was typically negative and dangerous. And we cry in self compassion that we were rarely or never appreciated and reflected as special, worthy, easy to love. Crying is often the only process that will resolve a flashback. Unashamed crying appears to cut off the critic’s fuel supply of fear before it devolves into frightened and frightening thinking. This is especially true when we cry for the suffering of our childhood abandonment, as well as for the lifetime of unnecessary alienation and pain that our critic has wrought upon us. Moreover, unabashed tears stimulate the relaxation response of the parasympathetic nervous system, and counterbalance the excessive sympathetic nervous system hyper-arousal we experience in a flashback. Crying and self-compassion: When we greet our own tears with self-acceptance, crying awakens our developmentally arrested sense of self-compassion. Once we establish self-compassion through consistent and repeated practice, it becomes the cornerstone of an increasing sense of self-esteem. When an attitude of self-compassion becomes habitual, it can instantly become an antidote to the self-abandonment that so characterises a flashback. Moreover self-compassion creates a foundation from which we can build authentic, intimacy-enhancing compassion for others. Our ability to be there for an intimate depends on our capacity to practice unwavering allegiance to ourselves. Self-compassion also naturally sustains our motivation for the long, repetitive work of fortifying our internal boundaries against the critic.


When we can both anger and cry while re-experiencing our early abandonment in a flashback, we can obtain a more complete release from the abandonment melange. Each survivor does well to assess whether his angering or crying is blocked or stultified, and to then work at recovering it. There are of course numerous men and women who are reverse examples of the gender polarisation mentioned above. Moreover, there are many survivors in whom both angering and crying are blocked. They also benefit inordinately from rescuing the healing balm of both anger and tears from the stultifying prohibitions of the critic.


3. Verbal ventilation

Verbal ventilation is the third process of grieving. It helps resolve emotional flashbacks. Verbal ventilation is speaking or writing in a manner that airs out and releases painful feelings. When we let our words spring from what we feel, language is imbued with emotion, and pain can be released through what we say, think or write. As our grieving proficiency increases, we can verbally ventilate about our losses, using shame-dissolving language to tell the story of how we were unfairly deprived of our birthright to be welcomed into a family that cherished us. One technique to enhance verbal ventilation is to encourage the client to focus on his feelings, his painful imagery or his bodily sensations, and then to talk in an uncensored manner about whatever comes to mind. Verbal ventilation is therapeutic to the degree that a person’s words are coloured by and descriptive of the anger, sadness, fear, shame and/or depression she feels. Ventilation that is liberally punctuated with actual crying or angering is especially powerful. Verbal ventilation is a tool that can remediate brain changes that are caused by CPTSD.


Susan Vaughan’s MRI research 'The Talking Cure' demonstrates that emotional flashbacks create a condition whereby the emotionally oriented right brain becomes over-activated, and the thinking-oriented left-brain becomes under-activated. This hemispheric polarisation corresponds with an overwhelming reemergence of childhood pain (emotionally remembered in the memory-oriented right brain), and the loss of access to the higher cognitive functions of the left brain. This temporary loss of left brain functioning explains why it is so hard for a survivor to realise that she is only flashing back and not currently stranded in the danger, helplessness and hopelessness of the past. Verbal ventilation, at its most potent, is the therapeutic process of bringing left brain cognition to intense right brain emotional activation. It fosters the recoveree’s ability to put words to feelings, and ultimately to accurately interpret and communicate about his various feeling states. When this process is repeated sufficiently, new neural pathways grow that allow the left and right brain to work together so that the individual can actually think and feel at the same time. He heals a crucial developmental arrest and learns to think about feeling states in a way that creates healthy, helpful and appropriate responses to feelings - responses that are respectful to him and to whomever the feelings arise with. In his book, 'Emotional Intelligence', Daniel Goleman writes that this is the core trait of emotional intelligence. With continued practice, verbal ventilation coordinates the left and right hemispheres and when the right brain is hyper-activated in flashback, the left-brain is also fully engaged (as can be seen in an MRI). With the left brain back on-line, the survivor can then initiate the various tasks that are helpful in successfully resolving a flashback.


As with angering and crying, verbal ventilation is only effective when it is liberated from the critic’s control. In early recovery, verbal ventilation can easily shift into verbal self-flagellation. Verbally ventilating from the self-attacking or drasticising perspective of the critic is rarely effective grieving. Instead it typically triggers or intensifies flashbacks, which in turn frequently generates self- and intimacy-injuring behaviour. Many survivors in early recovery are unable to notice their unconscious shifts into over-identifying with the critic’s point of view. When this is the case, they usually need the help of a therapist or sufficiently recovered intimate to help them recognise and neutralise the critic. Verbal ventilation is an especially transformative grieving process. It not only promotes the same type of fear-release and shame-dissolution as angering and crying, but also helps expose the manifold guises of the critic’s self-attack and fear-arousal. Verbal ventilation also helps us to identify and communicate about needs that have long been unmet because of our childhood abandonment. This in turn promotes the growth of the healthy ego, and most especially its key functions of self-compassion and self-protection.


Dissociation deadens verbal ventilation. It is important to differentiate verbal ventilation from dissociative flights of fantasy or obsessive bouts of unproductive worrying. Dissociation is a defence that children develop to distract and protect themselves from the overwhelming pain of their abandonment. They have to dissociate because they are not able, as unsupported children, to effectively grieve or even allow their pain into awareness. There are two common types of dissociation in CPTSD: right-brain dissociation and left-brain dissociation. Right brain dissociation can be seen as classical dissociation, and as the defence most common to freeze types. It is the right brain process of numbing out against intense feeling or incessant inner critic attack. Dissociation is a process of distraction… Of getting lost in fantasy, fogginess, TV, tiredness or sleep. Verbally reporting from a place of self-distraction is in fact the opposite of verbal ventilation. Getting lost in daydream-like descriptions of improbable salvation fantasies or in the recounting of long elaborate dreams devoid of emotional content and serious introspection are examples of this. Left-brain dissociation is obsessiveness. Commonly, this ranges in severity from repetitively cycling through a laundry list of worries to panicky drasticising and catastrophising. An obsessive defence against internal pain strands us in unhelpful perseverations about issues that are minimally related or unrelated to the true nature of our suffering.


Here is an example of this. I can complain incessantly about the bad weather or the unfairness of the rising cost of cinema tickets to distract myself from the fact that my partner’s constructive feedback is continuously flashing me back into the fear and shame that I felt when my mother verbally abused me at the kitchen table. Left-brain dissociation can also be a process of trivialisation – avoiding upsetting inner experience by over-focusing on superficial concerns. Becoming overly preoccupied with sports statistics or the lives of celebrities are common examples of this; this is, of course, not to deny that such interests are in themselves worthwhile when they are engaged non-defensively and in moderation. Finally, left brain dissociation can also be seen in intellectualisation. This is what the novelist, Ian McEwan called the “High-walled fortress of focused thinking”. Some survivors over-rely on rationalisation and lofty dialogue to protect them from the potentially messy and painful world of feeling. Even the highest levels of creative thinking deteriorate into an obsessive defence when they are excessively engaged. Verbal ventilation heals abandonment. When we allow ourselves to share what is emotionally important to us – and this applies to concerns that excite and please us as well as those that frighten, hurt or depress us – we can learn to connect with others in an authentic, meaningful and healing way. One of the most detrimental consequences of our childhood abandonment is that it forced us to habitually hide and mute our Selves. Many survivors have come to believe that their authentic and vulnerable self-expression is as repugnant or boring to others as it was to their parents. We must repudiate and overcome this damaging legacy of the past. Verbal ventilation is a key process in establishing healthy attachment, as key to children as the tender touch, soothing voice, and welcoming facial expressions are to infants and toddlers. When we practice this form of emotionally-based communication with a safe enough other, we repair the damage of not having had this need met in childhood. This in turn opens up the possibility of finally attaining the verbal-emotional intimacy that is an essential lifelong need for all human beings. Unfortunately, committing to this type of practice is much harder than it may sound. Authentic and vulnerable sharing can be extremely triggering, and can easily flash the survivor back to experiences of being attacked, shamed or abandoned by parents hostile or indifferent to such self-disclosure. Therapy, individual or group, may be necessary to overcome and work through these huge obstacles to revitalising our self-expression. Verbal ventilation and intimacy in reciprocal verbal ventilation is the key process of intimacy in adult relationships. Sufficient practice with a safe enough other can eventually open the survivor to experiences of comforting and restorative connection with others – experiences that can be more alleviating of loneliness than he would ever have thought possible. As deep and meaningful connection with another gradually becomes more available and frequent, he will increasingly experience amelioration of the frightful, shaming and deadening aspects of the abandonment depression. Moreover, he will learn the emotional communication skills that help him to process and to healthily integrate the difficult emotional experiences (disappointment, disagreement, disaffection) that intimate relationships normally and periodically undergo.


Finally, it is important to note here that there are some bodywork approaches to trauma that denigrate the efficacy of talk therapy, and in extreme cases decree that this all important process be bypassed and done away with. While somatic work of some kind is often essential to our recovering process, it alone cannot remediate the toxic critic or resuscitate the instincts of self-compassion and self-protection. A great deal of cognitive work, especially that which is empowered by verbal ventilation is fundamental to significant recovery from CPTSD. With that said, we will move on to Feeling, the fourth grieving process – a process that is a type of body work, a way of focusing on somatic experience that enables us to reclaim our ability to experience full, relaxed and vital inhabitancy of our bodies.


4. Feeling and passively working through grief

“Feeling is the antithesis of pain…the more pain one feels, the less pain one suffers” (Arthur Janov). Ongoing engagement in the active grieving processes of angering, crying and verbal ventilation can help us to discover the fourth grieving process: Feeling. Feeling is a subtler, passive process. It is best illustrated by contrasting the two concepts “emote” and “feel”. Emoting is when we cry or anger out the energy of an inner emotional experience. Feeling, on the other hand, is the passive process of non-reactively staying present to internal emotional experience. In CPTSD recovery, feeling is surrendering to the internal experiences of our childhood pain without judging or resisting them, and without emoting them out. Feeling is a kinaesthetic rather than a cognitive experience. It is the process of bringing one’s awareness out of thinking and into the internal emotions, energetic states and sensations of the body. As a grieving process, feeling involves consciously reversing the learned survival mechanism of clamping down on pain to banish it from awareness. Feeling “occurs” when we bring the focus of our consciousness into an emotionally or physically painful state, and when we surrender to this experience without resistance. When we relax acceptingly into a feeling, we can learn to gently absorb it into our experience. This is similar to healthy food digestion, in which a relaxed alimentary canal allows us to effectively assimilate nutrients. However, when we suppress or repress our feelings, our bodies typically armour and tighten all over, especially along the alimentary canal. This latter type of tightening also creates the types of digestive problems that frequently co-occur with CPTSD. Diarrhoea, for instance, can sometimes be an emotional-physical response to intense danger… a fear-induced triggering of the sympathetic nervous system that triggers an immediate evacuation of the bowels. Nausea can operate similarly. The emotional-physical connection It is important to note here that there is often a close relationship between emotion and physical sensation. Physical sensations in the body often co-occur with feelings. Moreover, sensations of tightness and tension can develop as a defence against feelings. As unexpressed feelings accumulate, a greater degree of muscular tension is necessary to keep them in check. A child who is repeatedly punished for emoting learns to be afraid of inner emotional experience and tightens (armours) the musculature of her body in an effort to hold feelings in and to banish them from awareness. Holding one’s breath is a further manifestation of armouring and an especially common way of keeping feelings at bay, as breathing naturally brings awareness down to the feeling level. Deep breathing also expands and stretches various visceral muscles in ways that sometimes release feelings and leads to emoting.


The technique of focusing one’s awareness on physical sensations in the body can help us become more proficient at the practice of “feeling”. With enough practice, paying attention to tightness in the face, throat, heart or belly area brings feelings into awareness, where they can be simply felt through. The passive grieving process of feeling through pain perfectly complements the active processes of grieving. We benefit immeasurably from becoming equally facile with emoting out our anger, sadness, fear, shame and depression, as with simply staying fully present to these feelings without trying to change them. Furthermore, feeling also expands our capacity to bring the emotions into awareness that need to be grieved out through active, cathartic emoting. Thus, grieving is especially profound when we can fluidly shift between feeling and emoting. Sometimes we will only need to fully feel and accept the sensations of our pain, and sometimes we will want to verbally ventilate about them within a matrix of having full permission to punctuate our words with angering and tears. Learning to feel 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. He can engage these opportunities by passively noticing and attuning to the more subtle sensations of his anger and sadness. Over time this practice will build his ability to stay feelingly and passively present to the sensations of fear, shame and depression.


In early stages, this awareness will often morph into the need to actively grieve out the fear, shame and depression, but eventually these feelings will also be digested and worked through purely with the solvent of awareness. It is important to note here that anxiety, which is often fear just below the level of awareness, can often be felt through passively.


An exercise in feeling: Here is an exercise to help you enhance your ability to feel and grieve through pain. Visualise yourself as time-traveling back to a place in the past when you felt especially abandoned. See your adult self taking your abandoned child onto your lap and comforting her in various painful emotional states or situations. You can comfort her verbally: “I feel such sorrow that you were so abandoned and that you felt so alone so much of the time. I love you even more when you are stuck in this abandonment pain – especially because you had to endure it for so long with no one to comfort you. That shouldn’t have happened to you. It shouldn’t happen to any child. Let me comfort and hold you. You don’t have to rush to get over it. It is not your fault. You didn’t cause it and you’re not to blame. You don’t have to do anything. Let me just hold you. Take you’re time. I love you always and care about you no matter what.” I highly recommend practicing this even if it feels inauthentic, and even if it requires a great deal of fending off your critic. Keep practicing and eventually, you will have a genuine experience of feeling self-compassion for that traumatised child you were, and with that, you will know that your recovery work had reached a deep level.


Listen to Pete Walker’s book for how to heal: 'Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving'.


For another full overview of trauma and healing from it, listen to the brilliant book 'The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in The Healing of Trauma' by Bessel van der Kolk.


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly



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