Thank you Cosmos and T.C. for your replies. It does help a lot. And as soon as I read your responses another quote by the C's popped up in my head:
A few books popped into my head when Laura asked this question:
Q: (L) And what was it?
A: They both turned their anger at their mothers on themselves since it was too frightening to be angry at the mother.
Q: (L) But I thought Pierre at least had dealt with that and had identified things?
A: Not at the primal level.
Q: (L) So they were like little children inside that were really, really angry at the mother and afraid to express that anger in a fully embodied way for fear of being, what? Cast out of the mother's love? Is that it?
A: Close. Fear of annihilation.
The first book is Pete Walker's
CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A guide and map for recovering from childhood trauma.
He writes that the human brain evolved during the Hunter-Gatherer era, and we still have this basic formatting. In earlier times, even a few seconds without contact with the parents set off the infant's alarm bells, as a predator could easily attack and carry off the child as prey. Children today feel parental abandonment or neglect as a looming threat of death. And in cases where the parent is actually the predator, the situation is even more tragic. He calls this process 'soul murder'.
"No one ever listened to you or seemed to want you around. No one had empathy for you, showed you warmth, or invited closeness. No one cared about what you thought, felt, did, wanted or dreamed of. You learned early that, no matter how hurt, alienated, or terrified you were, turning to a parent would do nothing more than exacerbate your experience of rejection."
When caretakers turn their backs on a child’s need for help and support, her inner world becomes an increasingly nightmarish amalgam of fear, shame and depression. The child who is abandoned in this way experiences the world as a terrifying place. Over time the child’s dominant experience of herself is so replete with emotional pain and so unmanageable that that she has to dissociate, self-medicate, act out [aggression against others] or act in [aggression against the self] to distract from it.
We're too young to realize our parents are at fault, and we are adaptive, so we assume it's OUR fault. But no matter what we do, it doesn't seem to work. The result is developmental trauma, which actually changes in the physiology of the infant brain. I see it as sort of like the carving of a massive self-hatred superhighway through the ecosystem of our grey matter. This becomes the default route for our sense of self and relation to the world. Other routes leading to self-compassion, self-observation, and self-expression, as well as confidence, curiosity, and joy, are not travelled as often. When we're older and start to develop a degree of consciousness, we can start to notice this aggression against the self as the vicious inner critic, or the negative introject, whose sort of like the the CEO of the hatred superhighway.
A: Close. You must never forget that this is a real war at the deepest levels, a war for souls and the future. All of you here are crucial to the successful outcome. All sorts of ploys will be utilized to destroy your unity. This was begun at your births and includes early childhood torture at the hands of those most susceptible to control in your lives. This was intended to make dysfunctional traits that would interfere with the successful completion of your respective missions. It is a great challenge. But you knew it beforehand and were strengthened for the task.
He goes into a lot of detail about it all, including the realization that when we have panic attacks, they are often flashbacks to this terrorized infant state, a feeling of dying or being killed or imminent death that can come out of nowhere.
But the most important part of the book to me is focused on treatment. The first is psychoeducation - reading about CPTSD, childhood trauma, etc., as well as exploring one's childhood through journaling, etc., and doing some personal archaeology to see just how bad it was. This achievement of insight is painful, but important.
The second part is shrinking the inner critic through a series of internal battles. This is done mainly via conscious use of anger as a form of mental blocking. It's basically redeveloping a healthy 'fight' response, learning to assert ourselves and take control over the forces of destruction within our own Being. It is a great challenge, but we can make use of the strength mentioned by the C's, and in my own experience it is doable with persistence and effort.
Using Anger To Thought-Stop The Critic
Thought-stopping is the process of using willpower to disidentify from and interrupt toxic thoughts and visualizations. Sometimes visualizing a stop sign at the same time can help strengthen thought-stopping. Since traumatizing parents cripple the instinctive fight response of their child, recovering the anger of the fight response is essential in healing Cptsd. We need the aid of our fight response to empower the process of thought-stopping the critic.
I cannot over-encourage you to use your anger to stop the critic in its tracks. We can re-hijack the anger of the critic’s attack, and forcefully redirect it at the critic instead of ourselves. We can then silently and internally say “No!” or “Stop!” or “ShutUp!” to short-circuit drasticizing and perfectionistic mental processes. Angrily saying “No!” to the critic sets an internal boundary against unnatural, anti-self processes. It is the hammer of self-renovating carpentry that rebuilds our instinct of self-protection. Furthermore recovery is deepened by directing our anger at anyone who helped install the critic, as well as at anyone who is currently contributing to keeping it alive.
Successful critic-shrinking usually requires thousands of angry skirmishes with the critic. Passionate motivation for this work often arises when we construct an accurate picture of our upbringing. Natural anger eventually arises when we really get how little and defenseless we were when our parents bullied us into hating ourselves. Most trauma survivors were blank slates who were brainwashed into accepting the critic as their primary identity. To the degree that a family is CPTSD-engendering, to that degree is it like a mini-cult. Cults demand absolute loyalty to the leader’s authority and belief system.
In early thought-stopping work, most survivors need to empower their efforts with a healthy rage against their parents for destroying their self-loyalty and their self-individuation. However, with enough practice, the survivor’s healthy observing ego can use willpower alone to disidentify from the critic.
In my experience, until the fight response is substantially restored, the Cptsd client benefits little from CBT, psychodynamic or mindfulness techniques that encourage us to accept the critic.
A: Right now you need help as you are ... weak. But the general principle can be understood from the term "righteous anger." If you think about the expression that the fate of the universe may depend on you it should make you angry.
So we can use the energy of the self-hatred superhighway against itself. Luckily the brain is plastic - nothing in us is set in stone so long as we strive to heal. And, so very crucial in all of this, is to be willing to feel all the catastrophic hatred one has of one's parents, without any excuses and no holding back. The anger is first directed at the inner critic, and then also towards the ones who tortured you, and in so doing it becomes this sort of protective righteous anger. Or at least that's how it was for me.
Another book that helped with reaching those levels of the subconscious mind was
Making Peace with Your Parents. It details active exercises in getting all the resentment out of the body. It also works with parents who have gone to 5D. Although the title includes the word peace, it's more like
'Making War On Your Parents'. Or that's how it was for me. Anyways, very good stuff.
Third, we can also flood the superhighway, by making use of conscious grieving.
Grieving is an irreplaceable tool for resolving the overwhelming feelings that arise during emotional flashbacks. Moreover, grieving is the key process for working through the host of losses that come from growing up in a Cptsd-inducing family. We grieve the losses of childhood because these losses are like deaths of important parts of ourselves. Effective grieving brings these parts back to life.
This corresponds with mythology - tears are curative, transformative, and full of life-giving properties, similar to how rainfall brings life to the barren landscape. I feel that grieving brings the Water of Life to those places in our grey matter we weren't allowed to travel to - the hidden valleys of self-compassion, self-confidence, and self-expression. It's in these places of abundance where our 'souls can fully manifest', or so I think.
There's a caveat, though:
If you find that crying or angering is inaccessible, does not help, or makes you feel worse, then your recovery work may need to focus more on deconstructing and shrinking your inner critic.
He mentions that the inner critic is sometimes so hostile to grieving that it may just end up beating the crap out of you for crying, for being weak, for feeling anything at all. So shrinking the critic may need to be your first recovery priority. He worked with many clients who were way too traumatized to grieve, and so they spent months working on shrinking the inner critic so that grieving could happen without setting off a toxic cycle of internal judgment.
Grieving expands Insight and Understanding
I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow
and called out: “It tastes sweet doesn’t it?”
“You have caught me”, grief answered,
“And you’ve ruined my business
How can I sell sorrow,
when you know its blessing?”
-RUMI
Insight, as crucially important as it is, is never enough to attain the deeper levels of recovering. No amount of intention or epiphany can bypass a survivor’s need to learn to lovingly care for himself when he is in an emotional flashback. It is crucial that we respond to ourselves with kindness when we are feeling scared, sad, mad, or bad.
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.
Recoverees also need to grieve the death of their early attachment needs. We must grieve the awful fact that safety and belonging was scarce or non-existent in our own families. We need to mourn the myriad heartbreaks of our frustrated attempts to win approval and affection from our parents. Grieving also supports recovery from the many painful, deathlike losses caused by childhood traumatization. Key childhood losses - addressed throughout this book - are all the crucial developmental arrests that we suffered. The most essential of these are the deaths of our self-compassion compassion and our self-esteem, as well as our abilities to protect ourselves and fully express ourselves.
A: It's not too late but that is not the problem at the deepest level.
Q: (L) What is the problem at the deepest level?
A: Grief for not being protected and cherished. He needs to grieve.
Q: (C) Breathing, meditation...
A: There is also some past life issue involved.
Q: (A*l) What does P** need to do in order to help us understand what we can do to help him?
A: Communicate without fear.
I've found that only after angering at the inner critic, shrinking it, then angering at my parents, then drawing sharp boundaries with them, as well as grieving, was I able to fully express myself and communicate with less fear. I still practice external considering with them, but I don't put up with their BS anymore.
Q: (L) So the infant fears that if the parents don't respond positively to you that you will die. Is what was driving both of them?
A: Close.
Q: (L) And so they turned this anger on themselves and basically ate themselves up inside, in a sense?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) All right. Anybody got any follow up?
(Joe) What's the lesson for someone with that issue? What's the primary lesson they learned from having that kind of experience in life?
A: You are souls first. The genetic body can be overwhelmed by early emotional, mental, and/or physical abuse. It is very difficult to reach those levels of the subconscious mind.
Q: (L) So if you can free up or release yourself from that programming, then your soul can fully manifest. Is that it?
A: Yes.
I can't say that I've totally deprogrammed, but these two books helped a ton to reach those subconscious levels sometimes. I was often surprised to hear the primal screams and sobs coming from myself when doing this work. But it always felt better afterwards. Taking time in meditation to seek out the all the dark, hellish material helped to get to there, too, to bring whatever light and love I could to that place - as well as other modalities like somatic experiencing and/or body sensing, as well as regular journalling.
We’re never going to be perfect. The main question that that section of the session raised for me is how are we supposed to know if we’ve resolved something, or if we think we have but actually haven’t? Maybe there’s a way of knowing, but maybe there just isn’t. Our skin will scar if it’s cut, and although some scars can fade over the years, they never go away completely. So what’s to say that our subconscious or emotional being or psyches are any different?
You'll know if you've resolved it, believe me. Everything changes.
