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“Another clue that we are in a flashback occurs when we notice that our emotional reactions are out of proportion to what has triggered them.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“We then devolve into a polarized process of negative-noticing â€� an incessant preoccupation with defects and hazards. We perseverate about everything that has gone or could go wrong.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Self-criticism, then, runs non-stop in a desperate attempt to avoid rejection-inducing mistakes. Drasticizing becomes obsessive to help the child foresee and avoid punishment and worsening abandonment. At the same time, it continuously fills her psyche with stories and images of catastrophe.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I once heard renowned traumatologist, John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“While the origin of Cptsd is most often associated with extended periods of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood, my observations convince me that ongoing verbal and emotional abuse also causes it.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“many new psychological studies now show that persistence â€� even more than intelligence or innate talent - is the key psychological characteristic necessary for finding fulfillment in life.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“freeze response is triggered when a person, realizing resistance is futile, gives up, numbs out into dissociation and/ or collapses as if accepting the inevitability of being hurt.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Guilt is sometimes camouflaged fear”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Grieving is necessary to help us release and work through our pain about the terrible losses of our childhoods. These losses are like deaths of parts of our selves, and grieving can often initiate their rebirth.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“When forgiveness has substance, it is felt palpably in the heart, and is usually an expansion of the emotion of compassion. Compassion is certainly not always the same thing as forgiveness, but it is usually the experience within which forgiveness is born. Often this happens via an intermediate process, where having grieved our childhood losses substantially, we occasionally find ourselves considering the extenuating circumstances that contributed to our parents raising us in neglectful or abusive ways. Most commonly these extenuating circumstances revolve around two issues. First, our parents often parented us in ways that blindly replicated the ways that they were parented. And second, they were often supported in their dysfunctional parenting by the social norms and values of their times. Nonetheless, it is once again vitally important that we do not jump into considering their mitigating circumstances until we have significantly worked through the traumatic consequences that their abuse and abandonment had on us.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Rapport repair is probably the most transformative, intimacy-building process that a therapist can model. I guide this process from a perspective that recognizes that there is usually a mutual contribution to any misattunement or conflict. Therefore, a mutually respectful dialogical process is typically needed to repair rapport. Exceptions to this include scapegoating and upsets that are instigated by a bullying narcissist. In those situations, they are solely at fault. I have often been saddened by codependent clients who apologize to their bullying parents as if they made their parents abuse them.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Collaborative rapport repair is the process by which relationships recover and grow closer from successful conflict resolution. Misattunements and periods of disaffection are existential to every relationship of substance. We all need to learn a process for restoring intimacy when a disagreement temporarily disrupts our feeling of being safely connected.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The disease of emotional emaciation is epidemic. Its effects on health are often euphemistically labeled as stress, and like the emotions, stress is often treated like some unwanted waste that must be removed.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“In retrospect I can clearly see that as my self-compassion increased, my toxic shame decreased. Modern advances in neuroscience [see: A General Theory of Love] suggest that we are intrinsically limited in our ability to emotionally regulate and soothe ourselves. More and more research suggests that our ability to metabolize painful emotional states is enhanced by communicating with a safe enough other person.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Thus, while it may be fairly easy to like yourself when feelings of love or happiness or serenity are present, deeper psychological health is seen only when you can maintain a posture of self-love and self-respect in the times of emotional hurt that accompany life’s inevitable contingencies of loss, loneliness, confusion, uncontrollable unfairness, and accidental mistake. The human feeling experience, much like the weather, is often unpredictably changeable. No “positiveâ€� feeling can be induced to persist as a permanent experience, no matter what Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy tells us. As disappointing as this may be, as much as we might like to deny it, as much as it causes each of us ongoing life frustration, and as much as we were raised and continue to be reinforced for trying to control and pick our feelings, they are still by definition of the human condition, largely outside the province of our wills.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Those who cannot feel their sadness often do not know when they are being unfairly excluded, and those who cannot feel their normal angry or fearful responses to abuse, are often in danger of putting up with it without protest. Perhaps never before has humankind been so alienated from so many of its normal feeling states, as it is in the twenty-first century. Never before have so many human beings been so emotionally deadened and impoverished. The disease of emotional emaciation is epidemic. Its effects on health are often euphemistically labeled as stress, and like the emotions, stress is often treated like some unwanted waste that must be removed.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The majority of my fellow human beings are peaceful people. I have legal authorities to aid in my protection if threatened by the few who aren’t. I invoke thoughts and images of my friendsâ€� love and support.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Many traumatologists see attachment disorder as one of the key symptoms of Complex PTSD.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“There is a healthy way out of this cul-de-sac of misdirected striving. It lies in cultivating self-kindness during those inevitable times when you feel tired, bad, lonely, or depressed. In this regard, the notable AA 12 Step acronym, HALT - Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired â€� can be helpful. Accordingly, I recommend that you focus inside to see if you have flashed back into the abandonment depression whenever you experience a HALT feeling. If you have, you can then work to generate the internal, self-compassionate attention described above.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Somatic awareness and sensate focusing sometimes opens up memories and unworked through feelings of grief about your childhood abuse and neglect. This phenomenon provides invaluable, therapeutic opportunities to more fully grieve the losses of childhood. If more pain comes up then you can digest on your own, please consider getting someone more experienced to help you with this process.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Deep level recovery from childhood trauma requires a normalization of depression, a renunciation of the habit of reflexively reacting to it. Central to this is the development of a self-compassionate mindfulness. Once again, mindfulness is the practice of staying in your body â€� the practice of staying fully present to all of your internal experience.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“This is how that reactivity takes place in a flashback. A survivor wakes up feeling depressed. Because childhood experience has conditioned her to believe that she is unworthy and unacceptable in this state, she feels anxious and ashamed. This in turn activates her inner critic to scare her with perfectionistic rants: “No wonder no one likes me. I’ve got to get my lazy, worthless ass out of bed or I’ll end up like that homeless, bag lady in the park!”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“If, however, we suppress or repress our feelings, our bodies typically armor and tighten, especially along the alimentary canal.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Emoting is when we cry, anger out, or verbally ventilate the energy of an inner emotional experience. Feeling, on the other hand, is the inactive process of staying present to internal emotional experience without reacting.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Feeling is a way of focusing on somatic experience that enables us to reclaim our ability to experience full, relaxed and vital inhabitancy of our bodies.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“As deep and meaningful connection with another becomes more available and frequent, the survivor increasingly experiences the shrinking of his abandonment depression.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Reciprocal verbal ventilation is the highway to intimacy in adult relationships. Sufficient practice with a safe enough other brings genuine experiences of comforting and restorative connection. For me and many of my clients, such experiences are more alleviating of loneliness than we had ever thought possible.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“angering, crying, verbal ventilating and feeling.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving