Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A GUIDE AND MAP FOR RECOVERING FROM CHILDHOOD TRAUMA

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

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?”

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 eminently loveable as a child. As he mourns the bad luck of not being born to loving parents, he finds within himself a fierce, unshakeable self-allegiance. He becomes ready, willing and able to be there for himself no matter what he is experiencing - internally or externally.

Grieving aids the survivor immeasurably to work through the death-like experience of being lost and trapped in an emotional flashback. Grieving metabolizes our most painful abandonment feelings, especially those that give rise to suicidal ideation, and at their worst, active suicidality.

You know that you-got-the-queen-of-spades bad luck. That bad luck of being the one person in the crowd who gets crapped on by a pigeon. That cursed luck of getting dealt those assholes from the parenting deck. It’s so goddamned unfair! Dad and mom’s unfairness was f*cking legendary!

Grieving out old unexpressed pain about our poor parenting gradually deconstructs the process of transferring it unfairly onto others. This is crucial because love and intimacy are murdered when the critic habitually projects old anger out at an intimate.

Just as the inner critic transmutes unreleased anger into self-hate, the outer critic uses it to control and /or push others away. Unexpressed and unworked through anger about childhood hurt is a hidden reserve that the critic can always tap into. The anger work of grieving the losses of childhood is so essential because it breaks the critic’s supply line to this anger.

Transference can also grossly distort our perceptions, and sometimes we can misperceive a harmless person as being hurtful.

The most common transferrential dynamic that I witness occurs when leftover hurt about a parent gets displaced onto someone we perceive as hurting us in the present. When this occurs, we respond to them with a magnified anger or anguish that is out of proportion to what they did.

As a baby thrives on love, so does the outer critic thrive on anger. Like a parasite, the outer critic gorges on repressed anger, and then erroneously assigns it to present-day disappointments.