Pete Walker is raw and honest about facing the depth of his own abandonment depression which he sees as lying at the heart of Complex PTSD… In his book Complex PTSD : From Surviving to Thriving, he shares about how over time he had to work to stay with and metabolize the intense fear that his own depression and other harsh critical voices caused within him on his own path of healing.. This is a process many of us face on the road to recovery and awareness as well as the growth and nurturing of seeds of self love. In fact taking the risk to open to healing and feeling our feelings will often, for many of us, involve confronting feelings of shame and worthlessness. These are often not at all warranted considering the heat and pain of what we dealt with in childhood or lacked the help to deal with.. Many of us had shame based parents anyway who may have been unparented and subject to different forms of abandonment, neglect, parental criticism or abuse. And when we are healing it is very important who we open up to about our pain.
My experience with someone in AA was that they shut me down and dismissed things that hurt in childhood.. I was sharing about this with another Al Anon member today. And I do remember a friend who at that time had undergone a bit of therapy herself warning me that it may be better for me to look to a qualified therapist for help. That took me some time and I stumbled a lot along the way before I found someone safe and not as triggering. That said with my current therapist I have been able to make a deal of major break throughs lately.
The toxic things our inner critic says especially as we begin to face the abandonment depression may launch us into full blown flashback. Pete Walker shares some examples of this in his book, one related to a client’s process when triggered into overdrive, or high level sympathetic arousal. In time, the person eventually broke through the shame attacks to convulsive sobs.. Walker was happy about this, obviously the client felt safe enough and in the face of his own onslaught upon arrival in therapy finally recognized what a hard time he was giving himself. Finally the ungrieved feelings of his inner child began to break through.
This is when meeting as well as holding in love is so very important from the part of us that can show true love and understanding for how the child in us suffered, and healthy validation and mirroring from a qualified person is absolutely invaluable in my experience, Due to my own highly charged emotional abandonment trauma I ended up leaving several therapists.. Some of them were doing a good job, others perhaps not so much.
As anyone who has been through it will know, when a therapy falls apart on us it can be extremely painful with the imprints it can trigger.. One of my therapies fell apart just following the death of my older sister and surrogate Mum in 2014.. The therapist handled things badly, she was not at all flexible, as I look back I got led to another therapist who was a little better but still our attunement and level of connection was not as strong as the one I have been able to establish with my current therapist Katina who I have been with for 5 and a half years now.. With Katina I have managed to make good progress though the inner critic shaming still goes on, recently there is another more compassionate empathic side opening up in me.. I still ‘split’ at times.. see a mal intent when my abandonment is triggered (as it is so often by my family of origin) but at least these days I can see where the pain and tendency to ‘hate’ them and see them as ‘bad’ comes out of, my own intolerance for my own emotional abandonment and its affects and effects.
Anyway I hope this post has been helpful for others dealing with a toxic inner critic.. This inner configuration that rears up so powerfully as we attempt to know the truth of our past and depth of our abandonment depression is also called the persecutor by therapists such as Elaine Aaron.. Later I will leave some links below to some posts I have written before on these forces which so often come to dominate the inner psychic landscape of so many of us shamed, emotionally abandoned or neglected and abused in childhood..
Emerging From The Dark Night 