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“A great loss brings up an emotional storm that opens up a hidden reservoir of childhood pain”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“12. Time Urgency. I am not in danger. I do not need to rush. I will not hurry unless it is a true emergency. I am learning to enjoy doing my daily activities at a relaxed pace.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“As much as I can forgive myself, that much can I forgive others. What I often forgive in others is an old pain of mine, released from the disgust of self-hate. It is an old vulnerability of mine that I now love and welcome like a bird with a broken wing. Shame and self-hate did not start with me, but with all my heart, I deign that they will stop with me. I will do unto myself as I would have others do unto me.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Premature forgiveness will prohibit us from showing the inner child that she had the right to be angry about her parentsâ€� cold-hearted abandonment of her. It will stop us from helping her to express and release those old angry feelings. Premature forgiveness will also inhibit the survivor from reconnecting with his instinctual self-protectiveness. He may never learn that he can now use his anger, if necessary, to stop present day unfairness. As real forgiveness is primarily a feeling, it is - like all other feelings - ephemeral. It is never complete, never permanent, and never a done deal.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Many of the clients who come through my door have never had a safe enough relationship. Repetition compulsion drives them to unconsciously seek out relationships in adulthood that traumatically reenact the abusive and/or abandoning dynamics of their childhood caretakers”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“A child, with parents who are unable or unwilling to provide safe enough attachment, has no one to whom she can bring her whole developing self. No one is there for reflection, validation and guidance. No one is safe enough to go to for comfort or help in times of trouble. There is no one to cry to, to protest unfairness to, and to seek compassion from for hurts, mistakes, accidents, and betrayals. No one is safe enough to shine with, to do “show and tellâ€� with, and to be reflected as a subject of pride. There is no one to even practice the all-important intimacy-building skills of conversation. In the paraphrased words of more than one of my clients: “Talking to Mom was like giving ammunition to the enemy. Anything I said could and would be used against me. No wonder, people always tell me that I don’t seem to have much to say for myself.â€� Those with Cptsd-spawned attachment disorders never learn the communication skills that engender closeness and a sense of belonging. When it comes to relating, they are often plagued by debilitating social anxiety - and social phobia when they are at the severe end of the continuum of Cptsd.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Feelings of abandonment commonly masquerade as the physiological sensations of hunger. Hunger pain soon after a big meal is rarely truly about food. Typically it is camouflaged emotional hunger and the longing for safe, nurturing connection. Food cannot satiate the hunger pain of abandonment. Only loving support can. Geneen Roth’s book offers powerful self-help book on this subject.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Verbal ventilation is the key way that people make friends. It parallels the way tender touch, soothing voice, and welcoming facial expressions helps infants and toddlers establish bonding and attachment. When we practice the emotionally based communication of verbal ventilation in a safe environment, we repair the damage of not having had this need met in childhood. This in turn opens up the possibility of finally attaining the verbal-emotional intimacy that is an essential lifelong need for all human beings.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Right-brain dissociation can be seen as classical dissociation and as the defense most common to freeze types. It is the right-brain process of numbing out against intense feeling or incessant inner critic attack. Dissociation is once again a process of distraction. Survivors commonly experience it as getting lost in fantasy, fogginess, TV, tiredness or sleep.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The most essential of these are the deaths of our self-compassion and our self-esteem, as well as our abilities to protect ourselves and fully express ourselves.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“She never learns that real intimacy grows out of sharing all of her experience.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“As a traumatized child, your over-aroused sympathetic nervous system also drives you to become increasingly hypervigilant. Hypervigilance is a fixation on looking for danger that comes from excessive exposure to real danger. In an effort to recognize, predict and avoid danger, hypervigilance is ingrained in your approach to being in the world. Hypervigilance narrows your attention into an incessant, on-guard scanning of the people around you. It also frequently projects you into the future, imagining danger in upcoming social events. Moreover, hypervigilance typically devolves into intense performance anxiety on every level of self-expression”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Grieving is the key process for reconnecting with our repressed emotional intelligence. Grieving reconnects us with our full complement of feelings. 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

“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. The survivor becomes imprisoned by a jailer who will accept nothing but perfection. He is chauffeured by a hysterical driver who sees nothing but danger in every turn of the road.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Toxic shame can also be created by constant parental neglect and rejection.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“[1] a minor upset feels like an emergency; [2] a minor unfairness feels like a travesty of justice.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“For many survivors, authority figures are the ultimate triggers. I have known several survivors, who have never gotten so much as a parking ticket, who cringe in anxiety whenever they come across a policeman or a police car.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Once a child realizes that being useful and not requiring anything for herself gets her some positive attention from her parents, codependency begins to grow. It becomes an increasingly automatic habit over the years.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“I had apologized for long traffic lights, for changes in the weather, and most especially for other people’s mistakes and bad moods.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“the narcissist in codependent clothing. My friend’s father is this type of charming narcissist. When you meet him, he lures you in with questions and elicitation that make you feel like he is interested in you. But, within a few minutes [once you have taken the bait], he suddenly shifts into monologing like a filibusterer. This particular type often masters the run-on sentence and there is nary a pause to interject or even offer an excuse for escaping. You have become a captive audience and your release will not be procured easily.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Many fawn types avoid emotional investment and potential disappointment by barely showing themselves. They hide behind their helpful personas and over-listen, over-elicit and/or overdo for the other. By over-focusing on their partners, they then do not have to risk real self-exposure and the possibility of deeper level rejection.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Many fawns survived by constantly focusing their awareness on their parents to figure out what was needed to appease them. Some became almost psychic in their ability to read their parents moods and expectations. This then helped them to figure out the best response to neutralize parental danger. For some, it even occasionally won them some approval.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“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. The situation of the abandoned child further deteriorates as an extended absence of warmth and protection gives rise to the cancerous growth of the inner critic as described above. The child projects his hope for being accepted onto self-perfection. By the time the child is becoming self-reflective, cognitions start to arise that sound like this: “I’m so despicable, worthless, unlovable, and ugly; maybe my parents would love me if I could make myself like those perfect kids I see on TV.â€� In this way, the child becomes hyperaware of imperfections and strives to become flawless.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“As stated earlier, intimacy is greatly enhanced when two people dialogue about all aspects of their experience. This is especially true when they transcend taboos against full emotional communication. Feelings of love, appreciation and gratitude are naturally enhanced when we reciprocally show our full selves - confident or afraid, loving or alienated, proud or embarrassed. What an incredible achievement it is when any two of us create such an authentic and supportive relationship! Many of the most intimate relationships that I have seen are between people who have done a great deal of freeing themselves from the negative legacies of their upbringings. “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Livingâ€� A further silver lining in recovery is the attainment of a much richer internal life.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Many of the successful therapies I have guided come to an end when the client gains an earned secure relationship outside of our therapy. This is typically a partner or best friend with whom the person can truly be themselves.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“the survivor learns to “follows his own blissâ€�. He is freer to pursue activities and interests that naturally appeal to him. He evolves into his own sense of style. He may even feel emboldened to coif and dress himself without adherence to the standards of fashion. He may extend this freedom into his home décor. In this vein, I have seen many survivors discover their own aesthetic, as well as an increased appreciation of beauty in general.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“All my relationships had been developed under the guise of my people-pleasing, funny guy persona, and in my current state there was not a joke anywhere to be found.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“All too often, your decisions are based on the fear of getting in trouble or getting abandoned, rather than on the principles of having meaningful and equitable interactions with the world.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“The collapse response is an extreme abandonment of consciousness. It appears to be an out-of-body experience that is the ultimate dissociation.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“Cptsd is a more severe form of Post-traumatic stress disorder. It is delineated from this better known trauma syndrome by five of its most common and troublesome features: emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self-abandonment, a vicious inner critic and social anxiety.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving