Many people come into the counselling room with a severe inner critic which in many cases goes back to childhood homes.
Just as many children acquire C-PTSD from emotionally traumatising families as from physically traumatising ones.
Denial about the traumatic effects of childhood abandonment can seriously hamper your ability to recover. In childhood, ongoing emotional neglect typically creates overwhelming feelings of fear, shame and emptiness. Emotions such as fear, chronic shame, depression and anxiety are often the lingering effects of a loveless, emotionally shut off childhood.
Children so need to believe that their parents love and care for them, that they will deny and minimise away all evidence of the most egregious neglect and abuse. Even in many cases saying their childhood was fine.
The lifelong process of deminimising the impact of childhood trauma is like peeling a very slippery and caustic onion. And often people are very reticent to start this process. It can create a lot of issues and remembering what happened maybe through your current lens of being a parent can see how different your your own childhood was to the one you are providing for your own children.
The fact that verbal and emotional abuse can be traumatic is lost on many childhood trauma victims, and many survivors of verbal and emotional abuse never learn to validate its soul-damaging effects. They never accurately assign current time suffering to it. Attempts to acknowledge it are typically blindsided with thoughts that it was nothing compared to kids who were repeatedly beaten - who "had it so much worse."
Ongoing assault with critical words systematically destroys our self-esteem and replaces it with a toxic inner critic that incessantly judges us as defective. Even worse, words that are emotionally poisoned with contempt infuse the child with fear and toxic shame.
Fear and shame condition him to refrain from asking for attention, from expressing himself in ways that draw attention. Before long, he learns to refrain from seeking any kind of help or connection at all.
Unrelenting criticism, especially when it is ground in with parental rage and scorn, is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child's brain. Over time a self-hate response attaches to more and more of the child's thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates internal neural networks of self-loathing. The child is forced to exist in a crippling state of self-attack, which eventually becomes the equivalent of full-fledged self-abandonment.
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.
Emotional neglect, alone, causes children to abandon them-selves, and to give up on the formation of a self. They do so to preserve an illusion of connection with the parent and to protect themselves from the danger of losing that tenuous connection.
This typically requires a great deal of self-abdication, e.g., the forfeiture of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-care, self-interest, and self-protection.
With that in mind how can you help yourself if you resonate with any of the above?
Can you find intentions you resonate with for instance -
I want to learn to be the best possible friend to myself
Or
I want to increase my capacity to play and have fun
Or
I want increasing freedom from unnecessary fear and toxic shame.
Use mindfulness or inner child work to help recovery from this.
CAVEAT- Be careful with opening this up without professional help as it can open doors that have been firmly closed for years, decades perhaps to help protect you and keep you living life.
A quote from Tara Brach to finish-
“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”
Info taken from Pete Walker- Complex PTSD.
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