Do any of you have memories of getting ‘the look’ for me it was a time to tighten up in anticipation of perhaps being hit or yelled out.. In our house the instrument of torture was the wooden spoon sometimes a hairbrush with the bristles face down or flung at you across the room.. The following exerpts are taken from Pete Walker’s book on Complex PTSD.
(in my work) I was surprised by that certain clients with relatively moderate childhood abuse were plagued by emotional flashbacks. Most of them were in fact quite sure that they had never been hit (memory buried in implicit memory). Many of them however would talk about how they hated it when their parents gave them the look.
The look, in most cases, is the facial expression that typically accompanies contempt. Contempt is the powerful punishing visage backed up by an emotional force field of intimidation and disgust.. A raised voice can be added intermittently to the look to amp up the power.
When a parent gives the look to a child, she is telling him that he is not only in serious jeopardy, but that he is also “a sorry excuse for a human being”. Over time, the look can make the recipient feel terrified and repugnant, as it drives him into an emotional flashback of fear and shame.
When the look is used to control an older child, it commonly flashes her back to an earlier, pre-memory time when the look was empowered by traumatizing punishment. The look rarely terrified a child into obedience unless it has been paired with hitting and dire consequences. Years of working with Parental Stress Services, convinced me that most children ignore the look unless it was previously accompanied by traumatizing punishment.
Typically, it is empowered by a psychological process called conditioning. (in this case aversive conditioning akin to a shock given in research where punishment via shock of animals is accompanied by the ringing of a bell.) After many repetitions it does not take long for the ringing of the bell alone to elicit a painful panicked stress response..
This is analogous to how a child learns to be terrified of the look. With enough parings of the look with physical punishment or extreme abandonment, the parent can eventually delete the smack and get the same results with just the look. With enough pairings.. it may last a lifetime (fear/stress response/emotional flashback) and go on to be used as a force of control. In my hospice work I have seen several dying, ninety pound mothers still able to put the fear of God into their huge sons with the look
The look is a powerful trigger for making adult survivors flashback to the fear and humiliation of their childhoods. Once again, many of my clients do not remember this because the punishment only had to accompany the look for a few months wile they were toddlers before it became permanently wired as a trigger. Moreover it is a rare person who has any memory before the age of 3 o 4 (due to implicit memory only being possible prior to later development of and linking of the higher cortical areas to the sub cortical brain areas.)
Unfortunately the look can continue to work even after the parent dies. (Due to internalization of parental responses into our brains and bodies). In addition the look also related to us being seen and judged as less that perfect. I often see this subliminal look mimicked on the faces of my flashback clients as they scowl contemptuously at themselves. And second, when anyone looks at us disapprovingly we can generalize that they are as dangerous as our parents. The worst thing about having been traumatized by the look in childhood is that we can erroneously transfer and project our memory of it onto other people when we are triggered. We are especially prone to doing this with authority figures or people that resemble our parents, even when they are not sporting the look.
Complex PTSD : From Surviving to Thriving (pp .150 -152)
Emerging From The Dark Night 