Sanctuary for the Abused

Thursday, November 01, 2018

Managing Abandonment Depression in Complex PTSD (C-PTSD)

Here is a map of the layering of defensive reactions to the underlying feelings of abandonment typically found in Complex PTSD. This territory is best viewed through unwinding the dynamics of emotional flashbacks.

Flashbacks are at the deepest level painful layers of reactions - physiological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral - to the reemerging despair of the childhood abandonment depression. One very common flashback-scenario occurs as follows: Internal or external perceptions of possible abandonment trigger fear and shame, which then activates panicky Inner Critic cognitions, which in turn launches an adrenalized fight, flight, freeze or fawn trauma response (subsequently referred to as the 4F's). The 4F's correlate respectively with narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, or dissociative defensive reactions.

Here is an example of the layered processes of an emotional flashback. A complex PTSD sufferer wakes up feeling depressed. Because childhood experience has conditioned her to believe that she is unworthy and unacceptable in this state, she quickly becomes anxious and ashamed. This in turn activates her Inner Critic to goad her with perfectionistic and endangering messages. The critic clamors: "No wonder no one likes you. Get your lazy, worthless ass going or you'll end up as a wretched bag lady on the street"! Retraumatized by her own inner voice, she then launches into her most habitual 4F behavior. She lashes out at the nearest person as she becomes irritable, controlling and pushy (Fight/ Narcissistic) - or she launches into busy productivity driven by negative, perfectionistic and catastrophic thinking (Flight/Obsessive-Compulsive)- or she flips on the TV and becomes dissociated, spaced out and sleepy (Freeze/ Dissociative)- or she focuses immediately on solving someone's else's problem and becomes servile, self-abnegating and ingratiating (Fawn/Dependent). Unfortunately this dynamic also commonly operates in reverse, creating perpetual motion cycles of internal trauma as 4F acting out also gives the critic endless material for self-hating criticism, which in turn amps up fear and shame and finally compounds the abandonment depression with a non-stop experience of self-abandonment.

Here is a diagram of these dynamics:
Triggered ABANDONMENT DEPRESSION -- FEAR & SHAME -- INNER CRITIC Activation: (Perfectionism & Endangerment) -- 4F's: (Fight, Flight, Freeze or Fawn Response).

Especially noteworthy here is how the inner critic can interact with fear and shame in a particular vicious and escalating cycle.

This article describes a treatment approach that decreases retraumatizing reactivity to the internal affects of the abandonment depression. It guides the client to meet abandonment feelings equanimously by staying somatically present to the physical sensations of depression and fear. This in turn promotes the ability to feel through abandonment experiences without launching into inner critic drasticizing and 4F acting out. R.D. Laing once stated that: "The only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid unavoidable pain". In my experience resisting unavoidable encounters with depression and fear accounts for more than the lion's share of the PTSD client's pain.

The etiology of a self-abandoning response to depression. Chronic emotional abandonment is one of the worst things that can happen to a child. It naturally makes her feel and appear deadened and depressed. Functional parents respond to a child's depression with concern and comfort; abandoning parents respond to it with anger, disgust and further abandonment, which in turn create the fear, shame and despair that become characteristic of the abandonment depression. A child who is never comforted when she is depressed has no model for developing a self-comforting response to her own depression. Without a nurturing connection with a caretaker, she may flounder for long periods of time in a depression that can devolve into The Failure to Thrive Syndrome. In my experience failure to thrive is not an all-or-none phenomenon, but rather a continuum that begins with excessive depression and ends in the most severe cases with death. Many PTSD survivors "thrived" very poorly, and perhaps at times lingered near the end of the continuum where they were close to death, if not physically, then psychologically. When a child is consistently abandoned, her developing superego eventually assumes totalitarian control of her psyche and carcinogenically morphs into a toxic Inner Critic. She is then driven to desperately seek connection and acceptance through the numerous processes of perfectionism and endangerment described in my article "Shrinking The Inner Critic in Complex PTSD" (see link for this article: Shrinking the Inner Critic). Her inner critic also typically becomes emotional perfectionistic, as it imitates her parent's contempt of her emotional pain about abandonment. The child learns to judge her dysphoric feelings as the cause of her abandonment. Over time her affects are repressed, but not without contaminating her thinking processes. Unfelt fear, shame and depression are transmuted into thoughts and images so frightening, humiliating and despairing that they instantly trigger escapist 4F acting out. Eventually even the mildest hint of fear or depression, no matter how functional or appropriate, is automatically deemed as danger-ridden and overwhelming as the original abandonment. The capacity to self-nurturingly weather any experience of depression, no matter how mild, remains unrealized. The original experience of parental abandonment devolves into self-abandonment. The ability to stay supportively present to all of one's own inner experience gradually disappears.

We can gradually deconstruct the self-abandoning habit of reacting to depression with fear and shame, inner critic "freak out", and 4F acting out. The processes awaken the psyche's innate, developmentally arrested capacity to respond amelioratively to depression and the fear and shame that attaches to it. It is a long difficult journey however, for even without attachment trauma, feelings of fear and depression are difficult to accept and weather.

The normalcy of depression

We live in a culture that judges fear as despicable, and depression as an unpatriotic violation of the "pursuit of happiness". Taboos about depression even emanate from the psychological establishment, where some schools strip it of its status as a legitimate emotion - dismissing it simplistically as mere negative thinking, or as a dysfunctional state that results from the repression of less taboo emotions like sadness and anger. I believe we must learn to distinguish depressed thinking - which can be eliminated - from depressed feelings - which must sometimes be felt.

Occasional feelings of enervation and anhedonia are normal and existential - part of the admission price to life. Moreover, depression is sometimes an invaluable harbinger of the need to slow down, to drop interiorly into a place that at least allows us to restore and recharge, and at best unfolds into our deepest intuitiveness. One recurring gift that typically comes cloaked in depression is an invitation to grow that necessitates relinquishing a formerly treasured job or relationship that has now become obsolete or moribund. Overreaction to depression essentially reinforces learned toxic shame. It reinforces the individual's notion that, when depressed, he is unworthy, defective and unlovable. Sadly this typically drives him deeper into abandonment-exacerbating isolation. Deep level recovery from childhood trauma requires a normalization of depression, a renunciation of the habit of reflexively reacting to it. Central to this is the development of a capacity to stay in one's body, to stay fully present to all internal experience, to stay acceptingly open to one's emotional, visceral and somatic experiences without 4F acting out. Renouncing this kind of self-abandonment is a journey that often feels frustratingly Sisyphean. It is a labor of self-love and a self-nurturing process of the highest order, but it can feel like an ordeal replete with unspectacular redundancy - with countless, menial experiences of noticing, naming and disidentifying from the unhelpful internal overreactions that depression triggers in us.

A relational approach to healing abandonment

I am a relational therapist, because I believe this journey requires reparative relational experience. Healing Complex PTSD and the attachment disorder that typically accompanies it is an interpersonal journey which needs to be initiated and shepherded by a therapist, partner or trusted friend who has the capacity to stay unreactively present to their own depression and the various affects that attach to it. When a therapist has this level of emotional intelligence, she can guide the client to gradually release the learned habit of automatic affect-rejection and overreaction. A key operation here appears to depend on the eye and ear contact of a bi-hemispheric brain process Daniel Siegel calls "the co-regulation of affect". Safe and empathic eye and voice connection with an individual with "good enough" emotional intelligence provides a working model and a "limbic resonance" to help her stay unreactively present to her depression and the fear that attaches to it. This, in turn, promotes the integration of right and left brain functioning - helping the client to feel and think simultaneously and egosyntonically. Moreover, as Susan Vaughan's book: The Talking Cure avers, such work appears to promote the development of the inner neural circuitry necessary to healthily manage and integrate depression and its attenuated affects.

Guiding the client into somatic mindfulness

Therapists can teach clients the practice of "paying" non-reactive, self-accepting attention to their own affects. Behaviorally, this entails staying aware of, focused on and present to the somatic experience of the abandonment depression. Typically, this process is indirect at first because depression so commonly and instantly morphs into the hyperaroused sensations of fear. Early work then primarily involves staying present to the kinesthetic sensations of fear and noticing the psyche's penchant to dissociate or distract from them. Dissociation can be either the classical right brain distraction of spacing out into reverie, fantasy, TV/computer trance, fogginess or sleep - or it can be the left brain, cognitive dissociation of becoming distracted in obsessive thinking. Particularly nefarious here is the inner critic's penchant for dissociating from and reacting to depression and fear with toxic cognitions and reveries of endangerment and perfectionism. Over and over, the client needs to be guided to rescue himself from dissociation (left and/or right), and to gently bring his awareness back into fully feeling and experiencing the sensations of his fear and noticing his reactions to it. Sensations of fear may range from simple tension and muscular tightness anywhere in the body, especially the alimentary canal - to nauseous, jumpy, wired feelings and shocks of electrification - to shortness of breath, hyperventilation and diarrhea, when it is at its worst. Although these sensations typically feel unbearable at first, persistent focusing on them with non-judgmental, non-eschewing awareness eventually lessens and quiets them. Held non-reactively enough, they are seemingly dissolved, digested and integrated by awareness itself.

It is important to note here that this type of kinesthetic focusing often triggers memories and unworked through feelings of grief about the client's abuse and neglect in his original abandonment. This provides many invaluable opportunities to ameliorate PTSD by more fully grieving the losses of childhood. Therapists can also use the results of such explorations to foster the creation of an egosyntonic and self-compassionate narrative that deconstructs the shame and self-blame the PTSD client typically assigns to her suffering. I describe a safe, efficacious process for this type of grief work in my book: The Tao Of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame. With considerable practice, the client eventually begins to exhume, from his fear, an awareness of the more elemental, underlying sensations of depression - sensations exceedingly subtle and barely perceptible at first. These sensations are initially as difficult to stay present to as they are to find. With guided ongoing practice however, focused attending also digests them as they are integrated into consciousness. As practice becomes more proficient, these feelings and sensations of depression sometimes morph into a sense of peace, relaxation and ease. Such relaxation can even, over time, open into a continuum of inner peace that may stretch from profound equanimity to that place of unsurpassable peace that various Eastern pundits describe as the Great Void or Sublime Nothingness.

Inner Somatic Work

Therapeutic gains in diminishing automatic self-abandonment in the face of fear or depression are augmented by individual introspective work. In my personal discovery of this skill, I spent over an hour a day in meditation with my awareness yo-yo vacillating between my body and my mind - between tense sensations of fear and the myriad disturbing mentations of my inner critic. These drasticizing thoughts and visualizations were my critic's outmoded historical interpretations that my feelings and sensations meant that I was in imminent danger of the abandonment of attack or neglect. My critic excoriated me incessantly to strive for safety through productivity and perfection. In the first year of this practice I frequently had to white-knuckle the handles on my chair to stay somatically present to my feelings - to break my adrenalin addiction, to stop myself from launching into my preferred 4F flight response. I had survived my childhood with ADHD-like busyness - with marathons of activity that kept me one step ahead of my fear- and shame-stained depression. Gradually as I used my focused awareness to digest my fear, I experientially discovered the rock bottom underlying core sensations of my abandonment depression itself. Over and over I focused on sensations of heaviness, swollenness, exhaustion, emptiness, hunger, longing, soreness, ache-iness, deadness. Sometimes these sensations were intense, but more often they were very subtle. With time I noticed how instantly my depression scared me and lead me to echo my parents' toxic shaming: "You're bad, worthless, useless, defective, ugly, despicable". Blessedly, with ongoing practice, I gradually learned to disidentify from the toxic vocabulary of the critic. I found myself more accurately naming these revisited childhood feelings: "Small, helpless, lonely, unsupported, unloved, needy" (as in profoundly unsuccessful in getting my needs for emotional comfort met).

Camouflaged Depression

Feelings of depression sometimes mimic gnawings of hunger, especially the emotions of abandonment which commonly masquerade as physiological sensations. Feeling very hungry a hour or two after a big meal is an almost certain signal of abandonment feelings and not real hunger. As much as this hunger appears to be about food, it is actually an emotional hunger - an emotional longing for safe, nurturing connection and for the satiation of abandonment. Even after a decade of practice, I still find it difficult to differentiate this type of attachment hunger from physical hunger. One, often, reliable clue is that the sensation of longing for the nourishment of attachment is usually in my small intestine, while physical hunger's locus is a little higher up in my stomach. (I believe the extreme longing for sex and/or love typical of sex and love addiction can similarly be an encounter with our abandonment depression, especially when no amount of affection or sexual attention from another seems to fill the void of longing).

On a parallel with false hunger, feeling tired is sometimes an emotional experience of the abandonment depression, and entirely unrelated to sleep deprivation - although over time the two can easily become confusingly intertwined. The emotional tiredness of not resting enough in the comfort of safe attachment and belonging, often masquerades as physiological tiredness. When our abandonment depression is unremediated, any kind of tiredness - emotional or physical - commonly triggers us into fear, which the inner critic translates into endangerment and imperfection, and the accompanying adrenalization launches us into one of the 4F responses.

Pseudo-Cyclothymia

It is a sad irony that reacting to emotional tiredness in this way can eventually exacerbate it into real physical exhaustion via a process I call the The Cyclothymic Two-Step. PTSD sufferers with a primary or secondary flight response frequently overreact to their tiredness with workaholic or busyholic action. They run so compulsively from their depression, that they eventually exhaust themselves physically, and at times become too depleted or sick to continue running. When this occurs, they collapse into an experience of abandonment so painful, that they re-launch desperately into "flight" speed at the first sign of replenished adrenalin. I have witnessed a number of such clients misdiagnose themselves as bipolar because of the extremes that ensue from desperately pursuing the adrenalin high and eschewing the abandonment low.

Adrenalization often becomes addictive because it self-medicates and counteracts the emotional tiredness that emanates from undigested and unworked through abandonment feelings. Especially noteworthy here is the endless and expensive journey that many survivors undergo trying to remedy emotional tiredness with physiologically-based medical treatments. Even worse, the short-lived (if any) improvements of such an approach increasingly augments the shame and self-hate of the sufferer over time: "What's wrong with me. I've changed everything in my diet and in my sleep and exercise schedule. I've seen every type of practitioner imaginable and I am still waking up feeling dead tired." It is a subtle, hard acquired skill, but learning to self-compassionately focus on the inexorable somatic experiences of sometimes feeling tired, bad, lonely, or depressed is the only way out of this cul-de-sac of self-destructive and unwarranted efforting. In this regard, the notable AA 12 Step acronym, HALT - Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired - can remind us to stop and pause introspectively to determine whether our abandonment depression has been triggered and needs the quiet, internal, self-compassionate attention described above.

We can sometimes gain motivation for this difficult work by seeing our depressed feelings as messages from our developmentally arrested child who is flashing back to his abandonment in hopes that his adult self will respond to him in a more comforting, compassionate and appropriate way.

Through such practice, clients can gradually achieve the healing that the Buddhists call separating necessary suffering (normal depression) from unnecessary suffering (the internal hopelessness, shame and fear, and the life-constricting acting out that ensues from unnecessary engagements with the critic and the 4F's).

http://www.complexptsd.org/symptoms-of-complex-ptsd

HELP FOR PTSD SUFFERERS

Labels: abandonment, adrenal fatigue, adult children of narcissists, c-ptsd, complex ptsd, depression, shame, toxic guilt, trauma bonding

shared by Barbara at 12:25 AM 13 comments

Secret Keepers

Confessions of a Liberated Secret Keeper

By John Howard Prin

From ages eleven to fifty-one I lived two parallel existences. Based solely on outward appearances, I looked normal, made a good impression, and was a high-functioning person. The volcanic drama of my hidden addictive life, however, and the ways it gained control over me, made me a Secret Keeper. It also made me ill.

In time I learned the simple truth: We are as sick as our secrets.

My double life flourished long before I took my first mood-altering drug and it persisted well after I'd established a life of recovery based on abstinence. My experience in the sordid, ugly, slippery domain of double-mindedness was a detour, but I've discovered I was hardly alone. Indeed, I was among the millions of Americans who are secretly addicted and still function in their jobs, in their homes, and with their families.

Appearing normal
At the root of double-mindedness—the constant shifting back and forth between two opposing mindsets, "normal-on-the-outside" and "abnormal-on-the-inside" — is addiction. For me, daily life became a burdensome struggle that led to a breakdown, to bottoming out. For 40 years I lived in two worlds, ricocheting between public respectability and private delinquency. They were years I would never choose to repeat, although they taught me invaluable lessons that eventually led me to the joys of whole-mindedness.

Today, as an addictions counselor, I often sit in my office or in group sessions and hear stories from clients who tell of their double lives. Unlike those who practice their addictions openly—such as heroin or crack addicts on the streets—the clients I counsel are sabotaged by their hidden double lives. They have ended up hating their split reality and doing harm to themselves or others.

Consider the hard-working mother with three kids who hides bottles of vodka in the laundry room, then binges when the kids are at school. Or the successful defense attorney who litigates high-profile cases in court by day but devours pornography alone at night to settle his nerves. Occasionally these sufferers show up at a counselor's office, deep into medicating the agony of splintered lives and highly opposing realities within their turn bodies, minds, and souls.

Secrets lead to destructive, violent living
Keeping secrets can make us neurotic. Secrets can be so toxic that a person is driven to self destructive and insane acts. Then come the addictions, the violence, the lying and alibis ... even suicide.

Everyone keeps secrets to one degree or another, often starting with fairly innocuous ones. A young student sneaks a peek at her classmate's test answers and gets a better grade—but tells nobody. An underage driver takes his dad's car out for a joy ride and returns it home safely-but never tells anybody.

Only the Secret Keeper knows what happened. Nobody's harmed. Not really. But keeping secrets creates a guilt pocket, a place where dark knowings accumulate.

Secrets are harmful when they blur our judgment to the point where we start living a double life. Over time, a double life severs us from those we love. It splits us into two personalities: a public, acceptable person and a private, unworthy one. Ultimately, it isolates "me" from "myself." It commonly means acting one way (smiling or cooperating) while feeling another (angry or frustrated). An entrenched double life, resulting from a pattern of secret choices an individual makes for long periods of time, inevitably makes even the best person sick. Numerous normal appearing people are card-carrying Secret Keepers.

A mother to hate and to hide from
One of these was my normal-appearing mother. An attractive and ambitious lady, Ellen Prin made sure her social graces radiated in public. Anyone meeting her could never have guessed she would be anything but charming. In private, though, she was hyper and anxious. Over the years, she went crazy from taking too many prescription drugs. Because my dad was a popular entertainer, it meant he was away from home day and night, six days a week, 50 weeks a year. Dad's absences wore her down. The lonelier she became, the more her pill bottles filled up the medicine cabinet.

When I was eleven, she made an announcement that changed my life. My twin brother, Dave, and I had just crawled under the covers and turned out the lights. Mom came into our bedroom and sat quietly on the edge of our bed. "Boys, I have exciting news. We're moving to a big, new house!" She told us how her dream house would be nestled on the shore of beautiful lakeshore property for all the world to see. Both Dave and I pleaded to stay where we belonged, not go to some unfamiliar suburb, but it became obvious that we were helpless to prevent an already adult-made decision.

Days later we all visited the natural wild beauty of the lake property. Before Dave and I, and our older brother Tommy, could run off and start playing, Mom ordered us to move a grove of birch trees 500 yards to the lake shore, where she would enjoy viewing them someday through the then imaginary picture window. At 10:00 in the morning we started.

The sunny day became hot and we sweated in our T-shirts as we hauled the heavy, sloshing pails of lake water, uprooted dozens of the younger trees, put them in wheelbarrows, dug deep holes, and replanted them—all because "Mom said so." We lifted, we carried, we worked until dark. At last we dropped into our beds in our "real" home and gazed at one another with sunken eyes. Our doubts about the move had materialized and we nursed our misery.

From that day on my double-mindedness became a pattern: outwardly I showed respect for Mom; inwardly I seethed with smoldering anger toward her. I held this secret inside me and began doing what came to be a habit, acting one way while feeling another. My insides slowly stopped matching my outsides.

Over time Mom's projects for us boys multiplied, accompanied by her increasingly bossy orders, and we realized to our chagrin that the house came before anything. Our free time for homework from school classes took a back seat to working for her: tiling floors, painting bedrooms, building shelves, planting flowerbeds. After school. Weekends. Holidays. Even meals hardly mattered; we boys fixed our own while she often pouted.

Her obsessions kindled hatred in me, deep hatred. Life became warped, upside down. Our needs as children were neglected and subordinated to meet hers. School became a refuge, a safe place where the bells announced a sane, predictable world. Tommy, Dave, and I kept the secrets of our home life to ourselves.

Those years of upside-down priorities overwhelmed my ability to cope and led to escapist Secret-KeepingSM behaviors. Dave and I eventually tired of complaining to one another and started playing a new game called "Getting Lost." Evading Mom before she could trap us after school, we ran from the house and stayed out for hours, sometimes until dark. We knew we'd face her wrath when we got home, but soon we became numb to her shrill scoldings.

I struggled to reconcile my love for her with the intense, clashing tensions I harbored toward her in my private world. By my sophomore year in high school, I had to keep buried the biggest secret of all: my thoughts of killing Mom.

For the next several years, I operated at an even deeper level of duality that took great amounts of energy and led eventually to a stomach ulcer, nail-biting, high blood pressure, paralyzing headaches, and alcohol/drug abuse.

Secret-Keeping depends on acting one way while feeling another.

Signs of Secret-Keeping
Perhaps my story strikes a familiar chord with you. Maybe you had similar experiences when you were growing up. As I learned, a secret life can start long before addiction to mood-altering chemicals or activities.

If you take a moment to revisit your childhood, you may find evidence of secret keeping. Look for signs such as these in your life, then and now:

• Secret-Keeping depends on acting one way while feeling another—your insides gradually no longer match your outsides.

• Skewed priorities imposed on children set up the conditions for secret lives to fester and grow, at times leading to grossly distorted emotions like hatred or homicidal urges.

• A secret life demands high levels of calculation and hair-splitting between two worlds, especially escaping from the source of pain.

• Secret lives are learned and may take the form of stealing hours away from "reality" by isolating oneself geographically or psychologically from persons we are meant to connect with.

Are you one of these people, too? Perhaps everyone battles the compulsion of double-mindedness to some degree in their lives. There are ways to unlearn secret keeping habits, and to free oneself of the resulting dysfunctions. A great way to start is by attending a good 12 Step group and meeting folks like yourself. You may also wish to seek professional help.

The simple truth? We are as sick as our secrets ... but there's hope!

John Prin works as a licensed alcohol and drug counselor at a treatment center in the Twin Cities. You are invited to send your comments, questions, or insights to him at John@JohnPrin.com or to call him at 952-941-1870. (If you use your real name, your confidentiality will be protected).

This article appeared in The Phoenix, June 2001

You can visit Mr. Prin's TERRIFIC website HERE

Labels: addictions, domestic violence, guilt, hidden, secrets, shame, toxic guilt

shared by Barbara at 12:19 AM 0 comments

Working Towards Emotional Healing: Dealing with Shame

As You Work Toward Emotional Healing
Survivors of abuse often have to deal with feelings of shame. There is an important difference between shame and guilt, and that is the key to dealing with shame effectively.

Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary defines shame as "the painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another." And yes, it is a painful feeling, and is VERY common among survivors of abuse.

For our discussion, we'll make some simplifications. Guilt is an emotion and a legal concept that belongs to the perpetrator, the initiator of an act of abuse.

Shame is an emotion that afflicts the victim, the recipient of an act of abuse. Obviously, the perp should feel shame as well as guilt, but often feels neither, so we'll leave that out of this discussion. We'll talk about how victims can deal with shame.

Even if you have worked hard to deal with guilt, and have assigned guilt to the person who abused you, and resolved the fact that no guilt belongs to you, shame may still be making you miserable. Shame rises out of a sense of powerlessness and frustration, as well as the continual feeling of shock that something this horrible has happened to you. Both men and women deal with shame, but experts believe that in general, among abuse survivors, women tend to feel more guilt, and men tend to feel more shame. But generalizations can be dangerous, and let's just agree that both shame and guilt can make people miserable.

Emotional Wound
First, it helps to realize that the actual physical act of abuse is not as important as you think. The physical act, whatever it may have been, was done by the perp to give himself a feeling of power, and to give you a feeling of powerlessness. The act was carefully chosen by the perp, thinking like a torturer, to give you the most emotional pain. So when dealing with shame, don't think in terms of healing your physical wounds. You must think of it in emotional terms, and analyze what your emotional wounds are.

For your physical wounds, you went to a doctor or an emergency room. For your emotional wounds, you have to see a therapist. Many people resist this step, but it is no stranger than seeing a doctor for your bruises or cuts, and is every bit as important.

An aside: I've had physical wounds. A few hours after a major surgery, I was taken to get a CAT Scan. I had a large, freshly sutured incision on my stomach. The iodine solution I had to drink for the CAT Scan made me vomit, and it felt like it was ripping my incision open, and ripping my entire body apart. What's my point? I've had physical pain. Emotional pain hurts more. That's my point.

Powerlessness
The powerlessness, the fear, the shock of the abuse is behind your feeling of shame. Even if you know the perp is guilty, that doesn't necessarily affect your feelings of shame. You need to realize that the perpetrator worked very hard to ensure that he had all of the power, and you had none. Abusers will use the element of surprise. Abusers will use an age difference, especially when adults abuse children, but also when adults abuse the elderly. Abusers will use weapons. Abusers will use threats and coercion -- "unless you have sex with me, I'll assault your younger sister"; some are much more subtle. Abusers will use economic issues, like threatening to evict the victim unless they comply.

Batterers are especially fond of economic power, and will make sure that if their battered wife leaves them, she will have no options for taking care of herself or the children. Abusers will use gender issues to cultivate fear, wherein the man is comfortable with violence and the woman is not, even though there may not be a large difference in their physical sizes.The thing to remember is that no matter what the specifics are, the perpetrator has taken enormous pains to make sure that this is not a fair fight; that all of the advantages are his, and you have none at all. It is not fair for you to feel that you "should" have been able to do something to stop it. The perpetrator made sure you couldn't. In those circumstances, almost nobody could have. The abuse happened because the perpetrator planned it carefully, and was never, never fair.

It's not because you were weak, or cowardly, or gullible, or stupid.

Let's use a poker-playing analogy. You didn't lose because you were a lousy poker player. You lost because the perp was using a marked deck that he had prepared himself. He made sure he dealt himself four aces, and he made sure he dealt you nothing of value. He cheated, from beginning to end. That card game had nothing to do with your skill at playing cards.

Some people are helped by making a two-column chart, where they write down the things that describe the perpetrator in one column, and the things that described themselves at the time in the other column. It ends up looking something like this:

AGE: Perp was in his thirties. I was six years old.
STRENGTH: Perp was an adult. I was a little boy.
STRATEGY: Perp planned a surprise attack. I was innocent and unsuspecting.
PREPARATION: Perp was a predator. Nobody had even mentioned this subject to me before in my life.

As you proceed with this chart, it will become more and more clear how unfair and lopsided the contest was. It will help you understand and feel why shame is not a fair emotion for you to have.

The Perp Was Lying
Remember, too, that the shame has been carefully implanted in you by the perpetrator.

There are two reasons for this: first, that is how he got his pleasure; by making you feel ashamed. Second, that is how he hoped to keep you from reporting the act to someone who had power over him.

No matter what the perp said to you, it was wrong. Nothing he said was true; everything he said was a lie to serve himself. It made him feel good and it made him feel safe. As long as the shame persists, it is giving him power. If you reject the shame, you are taking a major step in fighting back. If you reject the shame, you will make him feel bad, and you will make him feel unsafe. If you reject the shame, you will be taking power away from him, and empowering yourself.

Talking about abuse is never easy. But if you talk to an expert, the expert will know that there is no guilt on your head, and no shame either. The expert will know how deeply you have been wounded, and will know how completely unfair the situation was to you. The expert will admire you for having survived, and for having the courage to step forward and talk about it.

The expert will also know how you can heal from your emotional wounds, and will be happy to share that information with you.

If the abuse is ongoing, or if it happened thirty years ago, the emotional wounds are still very real. It is never too late to start working on emotional healing. Call your local women's crisis center or child abuse prevention center and ask for help. To find the center nearest you, call your county social services office for the name and phone number of the crisis centers. Or find a qualified therapist to work on these issues.

The other thing to do is to start seeing a therapist to help heal your emotional wounds. If you are hesitant about that, check out this article I wrote about what therapy can do for you.

The experts at the women's crisis center or child abuse prevention center can help you find a good therapist who specializes in helping people just like you. Right now, you are all alone with this problem. It is time to get some friends and allies on your side, to take power away from the perp and keep it for yourself, to regain a sense of strength and confidence, to eliminate the emotional pain that is grinding you down, to mobilize the power structure of your county against the criminal who abused you.

If you recognize the difference between guilt and shame, and then isolate each of them, you can work with a therapist to kill them off, one by one. If you have been abused, 100% of the guilt is on the perpetrator, and none is on you. Zero. Zip. Nada. And if you have been abused, 100% of the shame belongs on the perpetrator too. And none belongs on you.

Zero. Zip. Nada.

Not even a smidgen.

Labels: abuse, control, emotional healing, emotional rape, guilt, power, shame, toxic guilt

shared by Barbara at 12:05 AM 9 comments

Abusive Relationships & Toxic Guilt

by Patty E. Fleener M.S.W

I believe that most of us, especially those of us who have mental health disorders, feel guilt in situations where we have no business whatsoever feeling guilt.

It is easy to just look at our behavior, the situation and ourselves and say "I'm guilty! I am ashamed." Now let's back up a bit here.

When I say look at ourselves, it might benefit most of us to look a little deeper. We are complex, complicated creatures and our motivation for doing or not doing something is not just based on our personality, our will, etc.

What do I mean? Let me give you an example of something that may help you see this picture more clearly.

I have been seeing a man who is extremely emotionally and verbally abusive. Now of course I was not aware of his abuse issues at first but I will admit that I saw red flags right from the start.

Mind you, I have trained staff in domestic violence, etc.

The situation I recently faced was a history of ten months seeing this guy, addicted to him, and no matter how much I complained to him about his behavior, I kept going back. I would continue to go back into a little denial that really he is not abusive and that one day we will have a wonderful relationship. I had a very difficult time facing reality because like any addiction, I would occasionally get what I call "adrenalin shots." These "shots" kept me hooked in a situation that I could not get out of. I could not get out of this relationship.

I did notice as I worked harder to get out, he trumped up his abuse. Finally the emotional abuse became so bad that I just could no longer take the abuse he threw at me.

Again I wrote him an email kindly asking him to end this thing between us as it was killing me and that I was having a difficult time getting out. Now imagine an abuser and their personality and their agenda. Would he kindly assist me in this? Of course not.

Of course I knew it was my responsibility to get out I noticed that every time I tried to get out I felt sick. I prayed and prayed to God and asked Him to assist me, started journaling, which did help by the way, but I couldn't get out and if I got close to getting out he knew just how to suck me back in. Wonderful words he would say - tell me just what I needed to hear.

Abuse of any kind decreases your self-esteem and for me I felt like my mind was literally being twisted. His behavior did NOT make sense and the more he did strange stuff, the more twisted I felt.

During this time I felt TREMENDOUS guilt that I could not leave the relationship. It was humiliating to keep enduring his abuse. Every one told me he was playing head games with me, playing with me, etc. This knowledge was very difficult to assimilate and I so needed to believe that he truly loved and cared about me and that I was special to him. I felt I couldn't face any other reality, as it was too painful.

One day I was eating lunch and watching a movie on television in the midst of all the craziness. In the movie the husband was verbally, emotionally and physically abusing his wife. Two times in the movie he said to her, "I own you." The first time it went over my head but the second time he said that to her my jaw dropped and I probably looked shocked, like I had seen a ghost.

My father repeatedly told me he owned me when I was growing up. I never understood that. Once in high school I remember him telling me how he wanted my hair cut. I kindly said I wanted it cut differently and he in no uncertain terms told me I belonged to him, I was his property and he will do with me what he likes.

I had many times questioned whether my dad was verbally and emotionally abusive to me for many years but I never got to the point where I completely came out of denial until now.

I think we are more inclined to unconsciously look for the environment we were raised in, even if it was abusive. We are familiar with that environment and a non-abusive environment is strange.

People that have been abused don't see a lot of the red flags that others see because that way of life for them I normal. Many of us feel that love is pain.

It is vital to remember when you look back on your life or you are currently facing a situation where you are unhappy with your behavior, that you are struggling so much due to your history of abuse. You may appear "weak" and unable to get out of that situation without outside help. It says nothing about your character but everything about your past.

So it is that in my opinion we go to therapy and learn what "normal" is so that we can behave more and more that way and be attracted to healthy people.

Experiencing guilt is not looking at the entire picture and is inappropriate in many cases.

There is "good" guilt that motivates us to do the right thing but in these situations we are experiencing toxic shame. Many of us feel we are bad all the way to the core.

Should we crucify our parents for our issues now? No. They may have done the best they can. Take a look at their family of origin.

We are always responsible for our behavior however and we are responsible to get help if we feel like we are drowning.

Labels: abusive, emotional, humiliation, relationships, toxic guilt, verbal abuse

shared by Barbara at 12:08 AM 13 comments