Understanding Complex PTSD
This is the first part in a series of posts about my thoughts while reading A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD, by Arielle Schwartz, Ph.D. For more posts like this, take a look at my page on bibliotherapy.
Attachment Theory
There are four main types of attachment, according to this theory: Secure, insecure ambivalent, insecure avoidant, and disorganized.
People who grow up with parents who are “good enough” tend to have secure attachments to people. They can develop meaningful relationships and can handle conflict.
People who grew up with unpredictable parents develop insecure ambivalent attachments. People who are insecure and ambivalent are afraid of being abandoned, but also feel dependent on people.
People who grew up with distant parents who didn’t engage with them develop insecure avoidant attachments. They are dismissive of their own and others’ emotions and may be overly self-reliant.
People who had abusive parents can grow up to have disorganized attachments. People with disorganized attachments can go back and forth between feeling things like fear and anger and feeling things like depression or defeat. They can develop relationships with abusive people or become abusive, themselves.
Schwartz says it’s common to have a mix of attachment styles, though, because of differing relationships between you and each of your parents. I read through this section and saw myself in all three of the dysfunctional attachment styles. My mother was very unpredictable. You never knew what would set her off. Some days, she would be the “best friend,” and other days, she would be an evil witch. My father abandoned us after several years of weekend visits, too, so there’s that element of fear of abandonment that I carry with me.
On the other hand, both parents were rather dismissive of our emotional needs. We ended up caring for ourselves, and to a lesser extent for each other. Or, at least, I tried to care for my younger siblings. There’s only so much the oldest can do, though. As a result of this, I do have problems with some types of intimacy with my partner.
I think the strongest attachment type I have, though, is the disorganized one. Both parents were physically abusive and while my father was emotionally neglectful, my mother was downright emotionally abusive. She instilled fear in us on almost a daily basis. Aside from school, we didn’t have any routines, growing up, except that on Saturdays, we were expected to clean the house from floor to ceiling. Our mother did not participate in this past the time we could take the responsibility on for ourselves, and god forbid we slacked. If we didn’t do things to her satisfaction, we were abused and punished.
I definitely do alternate between high levels of anxiety and fear and feelings of defeat and despair. Often, those things co-exist inside of me, especially when I’m under a lot of stress.
I walk on eggshells around my partner because the house is not up to their standards (forget the fact that I’m not the only one who creates clutter), and they can sometimes lose their temper and start to become demanding and threatening. They don’t threaten to harm me physically, but they do threaten to take it upon themselves to deal with the clutter, which generally means that my stuff gets thrown away.
Why am I so afraid that I walk on eggshells? My partner truly would never raise a hand to me. Physical abuse is opposite to their nature. But they can yell and get angry, and that sends me into a panic of anxiety and fear.
Emotional and Physical Symptoms
Avoidance, invasive and intrusive thoughts and memories, depression, difficulties with emotional regulation, dissociation, interpersonal problems, self-perception issues, distorted thoughts and feelings about the abuser, and overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and despair.
I think I’ve experienced all of these, except maybe dissociation.
I avoid my parents, and indeed the city I grew up in. I avoid my siblings and other family members. I also avoid classmates.
I often have dreams about being in my mother’s house and needing to escape with all my belongings. I also have other traumatic dreams in which there is some sort of disaster that I am evading with a group of people or on my own. Oddly, my siblings sometimes figure in these dreams, but I also have these dreams with a cast of entirely made-up people.
I am often depressed. I believe I live my life at a baseline state of depression. On a 1-10 scale, I’m usually at a 3, except on really good days, and then after those good days, I go back to a 3.
When I’m anxious or when a lot of things have piled on top of me, I have a really hard time with regulating my emotions. My body floods with adrenaline and my mind shuts down, and I have a hard time calming myself. I don’t usually get really angry or rageful, but I do become self-recriminating.
If reading a book or surfing YouTube can be considered dissociating, I guess I’ve done that, but other than the derealization that I get sometimes as a symptom of my migraines, I don’t think I’ve ever dissociated.
I do have a tendency to be overly self-reliant. I’m not sure that I push people away, but I do tend to be the one who tries to help people, often to my own disadvantage. I don’t recall being taken advantage of, but I sometimes do help others when I should really be focusing on my own work. I suppose that brings a little avoidance into the mix, doesn’t it?
I definitely have problems with my self-perception. I blame myself for everything. I feel guilt about everything. I feel like I’m not worth much at all and like I haven’t accomplished enough in my life. My best friend tells me that I am worthy, and I believe them, but only conditionally. And that makes me feel guilty, too.
I can definitely relate to feeling guilty about whether to maintain contact with my parents or siblings. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve cut off contact from everyone in my extended family of origin. I have cut off contact with a sibling because they’re toxic to my life. It took me a very long time to do this because of feelings of guilt and responsibility towards them for having abandoned them when they were still a child. I was only able to make the final cut when my best friend said, “Oh, you need to block them,” after I read my friend a text my sib had sent. They also prompted me to cut off the last line of contact with my mother, who somehow got my e-mail address. I rarely ever responded to her, but the incoming messages would send me into a tailspin. I was reluctant to cut her off because somewhere in the back of my head I thought that maybe she would see the error of her ways and give me things my father had given me as a child, which she had claimed as her own. Very misguided.
I can also relate to overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and despair. I often feel these, especially when I contemplate that over half of my lifespan is over and what have I accomplished? Not much. And I often wonder what the point is in living. I’ve never actively wanted to kill myself, but I’ve often thought that it would be nice to not have to wake up in the morning ever again. At the same time, I am afraid of dying because I don’t want to leave the people I love without me. My partner would be lost, from a business perspective, if I was not around to manage their administrative tasks. I feel a sense of responsibility to keep living at least long enough to make sure that they could manage things on their own if something were to happen to me. Yet I also don’t believe that I’ll ever reach that point. I don’t believe I’ll ever catch up.
Healing Strategy: Reclaim Choice
Schwartz presents two approaches to reclaiming the choice of time and place to address trauma.
- Make an agreement with yourself that you will address trauma at the right time and in the right place, giving yourself permission not to think about it at other times. Remind yourself that you have the choice as to whether to think about distressing memories.
- If you notice disturbing thoughts, feelings, or sensations, give yourself permission to write about it. Set a timer and when the timer goes off, put the journal away.
I don’t think about the past too often. My current mental states have more to do with current stressors. It is incredibly difficult for me to wrest back control when the stressors pile up. I need to give myself permission to find some way, any way, to distract myself long enough that I can calm myself enough to carry on with work. If that means I watch wholesome YouTube for two hours and work for fifteen minutes, then that’s what I need to allow myself to do.
I do find writing to be stress-relieving. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this blog. Unfortunately, I can’t always write here. My partner is unaware that I have this blog. I do have an analog journal, but more and more, it’s becoming physically easier to type than it is to write. My migraines often cause me problems with dysgraphia, and it’s more frustrating than therapeutic when my hand won’t write what I tell it to write.
I need to find a way to have this blog accessible to me regardless of time of day. I think the first thing to do is to start bringing my laptop into the house with me on a daily basis, or find some other way of recording things I want to think about in text at a later date.