The media doesn’t help any of us in current times with the high level of anxiety we so often feel due to the trauma of a complex multigenerational past passed down.. In fact if you watch the evening news you are going to see tens of stories about dramatic events playing out that caused some level of catastrophy for someone.
Dratsitizing is a word trauma therapist Pete Walker uses and WordPress doesn’t recognise it, it could also be called Dramatizing and is something our inner critic and running commentator loves to do.. When we live inside our head based in fear then we see a lot of danger out there. In chronic anxiety, body symptoms themselves become the focus of fear. In Complex PTSD it ‘feels like’ we are dying or close to complete annihilation and interestingly having a shame attack can feel like we are being annihilated or dying on some level and many of us do anything in reaction to run or deny that threat.. What happens if, instead we just stand up in the middle of it and bear the storm without ‘attaching’ I think you will find it passes on through fairly soon. This alone though may not help us recognise where all the fear and anxiety and painful feelings come from and how deeply they are stored only to be endlessly retriggered.
Pete Walker reminds us that social anxiety and fear of shame actually develops in an abandoning relationship with a parent. The cost of parental abandonment in his word is “developmental arrest of emotional and relational intelligence.” The result? We go through life actively (if unconsciously) trying to ward off threat by avoiding or attacking and defending, such that in Complex PTSD such reactive states just endlessly fire and re fire in a never ending loop unless we practice some active ‘stopping’ of them, due to recognition of what is being fired up from the past in terms of trauma flashback or neglect body memory.
The other hard thing is the neglect is a form of abandonment that is almost impossible to recognise with ease.. Walker writes:
most people remember little before they were four years old, and by this time most of the damage is done. It typically takes some very deep introspective work to realise that the current time flashback is a re-creation of how bad it felt to be emotionally abandoned.
The remembering and deminimization of the impact of the emotional neglect can take a long time… is is an intuitive piecing together of a lot of clues. The puzzle is solved when a critical mass of childhood reconstruction is reached.. (fostering an epiphany that neglect lies at the heart of the symptoms) ..
which brings :
a great relieving certainty that fragile self esteem, frequent flashbacks and recurring re-enactments of unsupportive relationships were caused by the closed hearts of your parents.
Such wounds according to Walker can only be healed by achieving true vulnerability with another human non shaming individual. I will say it again and make myself hear it finally.. WE CANNOT HEAL IN ISOLATION.. OUR WOUNDS AND HURTS NEED UNDERSTANDING AND VALIDATION. Deep level recovering only happens in this way, through bringing the early memories, enactments and experiences out of hiding in ourselves and with others who are safe..
We must also TELL OUR STORY… DESPITE ALL OF SOCIETY’S ATTEMPTS TO SHUT IT DOWN, MEDICATE IT AWAY, OR SHAME IT.. Walker sites the completion, coherence and emotional congruence in telling of such a trauma/neglect narrative as being most associated with the freeing of ourselves from an entrapment within it’s debilitating power.
I will conclude this post with these words from Pete Walker
When denial is sufficiently deconstructed you will typically feel genuine compassion for the child you were. This self compassion assuages emotional neglect by providing you with the missed childhood experience of receiving empathy in painful emotional states instead of contempt and abandonment. In turn, this can further motivate you to identify and address the many ways in which you were abused and/or neglected.
Watching the news may be a triggered loaded event for most of us with neglect, abuse or trauma history as what we are so often watching playing out are the widespread symptoms of such in the lives of others being enacted day after day in society.
Emerging From The Dark Night 