Understanding How Cptsd Is A Shame Based Disorder

For decades people understood PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder where one traumatic event could reverberate in a persons nervous system causing them to be flung into flashbacks that kept that traumatic event alive even decades after the event was over. For example: A soldier that underwent battle comes home and a car backfires sending them to the ground, heart racing, sweating and ready for a battle that has been over for years. A victim of assault hears a similar voice or smell and suddenly their mind is flung back to the most frightening, traumatic event of their life. 

It's awful and challenging but - it's also understood. People get it and there is a soothing in knowing that you are understood.... you are not crazy for what is happening in your body.

Complex ptsd was harder to understand since it doesn't come from one huge traumatic event but rather prolonged and often covert abuse or neglect that sadly goes unnoticed by most. For example - being raised by covert narcissistic parents that 'appear' kind, charismatic, likeable even. Yet behind closed doors they make their children feel shame, unworthy and not good enough simply because the child is not  cared for by the parents yet are expected to be the ones to satisfy the insatiable needs of their narcissistic parents. As a result, they grow up feeling as if there is something wrong with them, they are unworthy, flawed, not good enough. 

When the very people that you are dependent on in order to survive, make you feel as if you don't matter, are unlovable and unworthy - your nervous system sees that as a threat to your life. After all, if you are unworthy, then you can be thrown out, rejected, abandoned … left to die.

Sounds dramatic? Maybe - but your nervous system knows very well that you are too small to take care of yourself and so we cannot hate the hand that feeds us and keeps us alive so we turn the hate inward and we hate ourselves. It's easier to blame self than to blame the person your life is dependent on, since this gives us something to do to cope with the pain of the rejection and emotional abandonment. We get busy trying to figure it out, trying to find the secret formula to make the parents happy so that we can then find safety and connection. (This is hallmark of the fawning trauma response).

No child has to be taught that parents should love them, it's a given.... even to a child. And so when the very people that are supposed to love you unconditionally, reject you, cause you to feel flawed, bad, unlovable and unworthy, you grow up with shame running through your veins.

Now, not all shame is bad, there is healthy shame. This is when we do something wrong and we feel not only bad about what we did, but also disappointed in ourselves. But healthy shame allows us to reflect on these things and still motivates us to repair, to grow and to mend any wrongs. Healthy rupture and repair allows us to learn healthy shame. 

Toxic shame, which again is often the results of toxic parenting and toxic relationships is different, there is nothing healthy or beneficial to toxic shame. Toxic  relationships are characterized by rupture, rupture, more rupture, nothing but rupture and absolutely no repair. You are made to feel as if nothing you do can repair the situation because it is who you are that is flawed, damaged, unworthy and bad. Without the repair - our small bodies are left marinating in the most painful and lowest vibrational emotion out there - toxic shame.... which feels one step away from death.

The challenge with healing Cptsd is that since it is so shame based, and we have internalized the shame, there is little to no  motivation to heal because the belief deep down in the soul is that there is nothing we can do since this is who we are!!! We get stuck between a rock and a hard place. Feeling the pain of living with shame while lacking the motivation to change it because.... we don't think we can!!!! This often creates a start and stop type of recovery journey. We begin, but as soon as we feel the resistance to healing, we give up thinking it's impossible. 

There was a time when I thought I could never NOT have shame, I grew up with it in me as much as the blood running through my veins. It had become a part of my identity. I knew it, my body had memorized it and it was very familiar.

And that's the other challenging part of healing Cptsd is that when our nervous system had to go into overdrive to try to keep us safe, it can view a horrible existence that is familiar as better than an unknown future... especially if you were shamed, blamed, criticized and/or attacked when trying to heal in the past since this creates paired associations or over couplings in the nervous system that keep us stuck. It's one thing to understand and know that toxic parents created the toxic shame that lives within, but it's a whole other truth pill to have to swallow when you understand that now YOU or I should say your autonomic nervous system is doing all in its power to keep things as they are!!!! This is when the recovery journey feels like an inner battle - the real authentic you vs. the traumatized person you had to be in order to survive.

I won't lie and say it's an easy battle nor convince you that there is a quick overnight fix, after all your nervous system was negatively rewired slowly over time and through repetition plus emotion. I will say this though - it is worth it to be able to learn to come back home into your body and to be the person you were supposed to be instead of who you had to be due to the trauma.

Having had to go through this journey myself, it's now my mission to help as many others that were raised in a shame based family system where shame was used to hurt and control you; or where it was projected onto you so that the toxic caregiver could feel better. Shame and trauma do not have to be a life sentence and you don't have to do the recovery alone!!

If you'd like to join me live on zoom with an international group of people in the School of Transformation; I consider it Nervous System Rehab - come join us here.

If you'd like to investigate if you have Cptsd - make sure to check out these videos:

Do I have Cptsd?

The Traumatized Personality of Victims of Covert Narcissistic Abuse