My Notes

“In order to become whole we must try in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual “wisdom,” we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception.” p.1

“We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of our past and are thus able to live with it. Most people do exactly the opposite. Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that it no longer exists. They are continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time. They are driven by unconscious memories and by repressed feelings and needs that determine nearly everything they do or fail to do.” p. 2

Story of young Henry Moore. How he used to massage his mother’s back when he was small to help her with her pain. His sculptures later in life reflect the impression this experience left on him. p. 4

“…every childhood’s traumatic experiences remain hidden and locked in darkness, and the key to our understanding of the life that follows is hidden away with them.” p. 4

“Quite often I have been faced with people who were praised and admired for their talents and their achievements, who were toilet-trained in the first year of their lives, and who may even, at the age of one and a half to five, have capably helped to take care of their younger siblings. According to prevailing attitudes, these people–the pride of their parents–should have had a strong and stable sense of self-assurance. But the case is exactly the opposite. They do well, even excellently, in everything they undertake; they are admired and envied; they are successful whenever they care to be–but behind all this lurks depression, a feeling of emptiness and self-alienation, and a sense that their life has no meaning. These dark feelings will come to the fore as soon as the drug of grandiosity fails, as soon as they are not “on top,” not definitely the “superstar,” or whenever they suddenly get the feeling they have failed to live up to some ideal image or have not measured up to some standard. Then they are plagued by anxiety or deep feelings of guilt and shame. What are the reasons for such disturbances in these competent, accomplished people?” p. 5

“Though people who were raised this way may “seem, to some degree, to be able to empathize with other people. Their access to the emotional world of their own childhood, however, is impaired–characterized by a lack of respect, a compulsion to control and manipulate, and a demand for achievement. Very often they show disdain and irony, even derision and cynicism, for the child they were. In general, there is a complete absence of real emotional understanding or serious appreciation of their own childhood vicissitudes, and no conception of their true needs–beyond the desire for achievement. The repression of their real history has been so complete that their illusion of a good childhood can be maintained with ease.” p. 6

“These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her emotions. She cannot even experience them secretly, “just for herself”; she will fail to experience them at all.” p. 9-10

“Accommodation to parental need often (but not always) leads to the “as-if personality.” This person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self. He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it. Understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. A process of emptying, impoverishment, and crippling of his potential actually took place. The integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off.” p. 11-12

“An adult can be fully aware of his feelings only if he had caring parents or caregivers. People who were abused and neglected in childhood are missing this capacity and are therefore never overtaken by unexpected emotions. They will admit only those feelings that are accepted and approved by their inner censor, who is their parents’ heir. Depression and a sense of inner emptiness are the price they must pay for this control.” p. 18

“Of course, there is the theoretical possibility that a sensitive child could have had parents who did not need to misuse him–parents who saw him as he really was, understood him, and tolerated and respected his feelings. Although such a child would develop a healthy sense of security, one could hardly expect that he would later take up the profession of psychotherapy; that he would cultivate and develop his sensitivity to others to the same extent as those whose parents used them to gratify their own needs; and that he would ever be able to understand sufficiently–without the basis of experience–what it means to “have killed” one’s self.” p. 19

“Robert, now thirty-one, could never be sad or cry as a child, without being aware that he was making his beloved mother unhappy and very unsure of herself. The extremely sensitive child felt himself warded off by his mother, who had been in a concentration camp as a child but had never spoken about it. Not until her son was grown up and could ask her questions did she tell him that she had been one of eighty children who had had to watch their parents going into the gas chambers and that not one child had cried. Because “cheerfulness” was the trait that had saved her life in childhood, her own children’s tears threatened her equilibrium. Throughout his childhood this son had tried to be cheerful. He could express glimpses of his true self and his feelings only in obsessive perversions, which seemed alien, shameful, and incomprehensible to him until he began to grasp their real meaning.” p. 22

“One is totally defenseless against this sort of manipulation in childhood. The tragedy is that the parents too have no defense against it, as long as they refuse to face their own history. If the repression stays unresolved, the parents’ childhood tragedy is unconsciously continued on in their children.” p. 22-23

Another example. “A father who as a child had often been frightened by the anxiety attacks of his periodically schizophrenic mother and was never given an explanation enjoyed telling his beloved small daughter gruesome stories. He always laughed at her fears and afterward comforted her with the words: “But it is only a made-up story. You don’t need to be scared, you are here with me.” In this way he could manipulate his child’s fear and have the feeling of being strong. His conscious wish was to give the child something valuable of which he himself had been deprived, namely protection, comfort, and explanations. But what he unconsciously handed on was his own childhood fear, the expectation of disaster, and the unanswered question (also from his childhood): Why does this person I love frighten me so much?” p. 23

“Probably everybody has a more or less concealed inner chamber that she hides even from herself and in which the props of her childhood drama are to be found. Those who will be most affected by the contents of this hidden chamber are her children. When the mother was a child she hardly had a chance to understand what happened; she could only develop symptoms. As an adult in therapy, however, she can resolve these symptoms if she allows herself to feel what they were able to disguise: feelings of horror, indignation, despair, and helpless rage.” p. 23

“Every child has a legitimate need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother. In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to avail himself of her and be mirrored by her. This is beautifully illustrated in one of Donald Winnicott’s images: the mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother’s face and finds himself therein… provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child. In that case, the child would find not himself in his mother’s face, but rather the mother’s own projections. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain.” p. 28

“I understand a healthy self-feeling to mean the unquestioned certainty that the feelings and needs one experiences are a part of one’s self. This certainty is not something one can gain upon reflection; it is there like one’s own pulse, which one does not notice as long as it functions normally.” p. 28

“The automatic, natural contact with his own emotions and needs gives an individual strength and self-esteem. He may experience his feelings–sadness, despair, or the need for help–without fear of making the mother insecure. He can allow himself to be afraid when he is threatened, angry when his wishes are not fulfilled. He knows not only what he does not want but also what he wants and is able to express his wants, irrespective of whether he will be loved or hated for it.” p. 28

“If a woman is to give her child what he will need throughout his life, it is absolutely fundamental that she not be separated from her newborn, for the hormones that foster and nourish her motherly instinct are released immediately after birth and continue in the following days and weeks as she grows more familiar with her baby. When a newborn is separated from his mother–which was the rule not so long ago in maternity hospitals and still occurs in the majority of cases, out of ignorance and for the sake of convenience–then a great opportunity is missed for both mother and child.” p. 29

“The crucial significance of bonding has only recently been proved scientifically. One hopes that it will soon be taken into account in practice, not only in a few select maternity hospitals but in larger hospitals as well, so that everyone will benefit from it. A woman who has experienced bonding with her child will be in less danger of mistreating him and will be in a better position to protect him from mistreatment by the father and other caregivers, such as teachers and babysitters.” p 29

“Even a woman whose own repressed history has been responsible for a lack of bonding with her child can later help him overcome this deficit, if she comes to understand its significance. She will also be able to compensate for the consequences of a difficult birth if she does minimize their importance and knows that a child who was heavily traumatized at the beginning of his life will be in particular need of care and attention in order to overcome the fears arising out of more recent experiences.” p. 29-30

“What happens if a mother not only is unable to recognize and fulfill her child’s needs, but is herself in need of assurance.? Quite unconsciously, the mother then tries to assuage her own needs through her child. This does not rule out strong affection; the mother often loves her child passionately, but not in the way he needs to be loved. The reliability, continuity, and constancy that are so important for the child are therefore missing from this exploitative relationship. What is missing above all is the framework within which the child could experience his feelings and emotions. Instead, he develops something the mother needs, and although this certainly saves his life (by securing the mother’s or father’s “love”) at the time, it may nevertheless prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself.” p. 30

“In such cases the natural needs appropriate to the child’s age cannot be integrated, so they are repressed or split off. This person will later live in the past without realizing it and will continue to react to past dangers as if they were present.” p. 30-31

“People who have asked for my assistance because of their depression have usually had to deal with a mother who was extremely insecure and who often suffered from depression herself. The child, most often an only child or first-born, was seen as the mother’s possession. What the mother had once failed to find in her own mother she was able to find in her child: someone at her disposal who could be used as an echo and could be controlled, who was completely centered on her, would never desert her, and offered her full attention and admiration. If the child’s demands became too great (as those of her own mother once did), she was no longer so defenseless: she could bring the child up in such a way that he neither cried nor disturbed her. At last she could make sure that she received consideration, care and respect.” p. 31

Story of Barbara. p. 31-33

“…the tragedy of an individual history can often be seen with moving clarity. In what is described as depression and experienced as emptiness, futility, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness can usually be recognized as the tragic loss of the self in childhood, manifested as the total alienation from the self in adulthood.” Usually takes one of two forms: grandiosity and depression, thought these are usually intermixed with one lurking behind the other. p 33

“It is usually considered normal when sick or aged people who have suffered the loss of much of their health and vitality or women who are experiencing menopause become depressive. There are, however, many people who can tolerate the loss of beauty, health, youth, or loved ones and, although they grieve, do so without depression. In contrast, there are those with great gifts, often precisely the most gifted, who do suffer from severe depression. For one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one’s own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.” p. 34

Study about depression: “All the patients came from families who were socially isolated and felt themselves to be too little respected in their neighborhood. They therefore made special efforts to increase their prestige with their neighbors through conformity and outstanding achievements. The child who later became ill had been assigned a special role in this effort. He was supposed to guarantee the family honor, and was loved only in proportion to the degree to which he was able to fulfill the demands of this family ideal by means of his special abilities, talents, his beauty, etc. If he failed, he was punished by being cold-shouldered or thrown out of the family group, and the knowledge that he had brought great shame on his people.” p. 35

“Without therapy, it is impossible for the grandiose person to cut the tragic link between admiration and love. He seeks insatiably for admiration, of which he never gets enough because admiration is not the same thing as love. It is only a substitute gratification of the primary needs for respect, understanding, and being taken seriously–needs that have remained unconscious since early childhood. Often a whole life is devoted to this substitute.” p. 36

“Beatrice, fifty-eight, the daughter or missionary parents and a sufferer of deep depression, never knew whether she was hungry or not. Her mother had written proudly in her diary that at the age of three months Beatrice had already learned to wait to be fed and to suppress her hunger, without crying. Discontent and anger aroused uncertainty in her mother, and her children’s pain made her anxious. Her children’s enjoyment of their bodies aroused both her envy and her shame about “what other people would think.” Under such circumstances, a child may learn very early in life what she is not supposed to feel.” p. 40

“If we have thrown away the keys to understanding our lives, the causes of depression–as well as those of all suffering, illness, and healing–must remain a mystery to us, regardless of whether we call ourselves psychiatrists or authorities in the sciences or both. When psychiatrists with decades of experience have never dared to face their own reality and have instead spent their time talking about “dysfunctional families,” they will need a concept like a “Higher Power” or God to explain to themselves the “miracle” of healing.” p. 41

“Beatrice was not physically mistreated in her youth. She did, however, have to learn as a small infant how to make her mother happy by not crying, by not being hungry–by not having any needs at all. She suffered first from anorexia and then, throughout her adult life, from severe depression. Psychiatrists are denying this type of damage when they talk about “grace” and other “spiritual” qualities. In order to acknowledge the consequences of such early, hidden trauma, they would first have to do some hard work on themselves. Once they become willing to face the facts–their own facts–they will lose interest in teaching others about grace and other “mysteries” in the name of science.” p. 42

“Without free access to these facts, the sources of our ability to love remain cut off. No wonder, then, that even well-intended moral appeals–to be loving, caring, generous, and so forth–are fruitless. We cannot really love if we are forbidden to know our truth, the truth about our parents and caregivers as well as about ourselves. We can only try to behave as if we were loving. But this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love. It is confusing and deceptive, and it produces much helpless rage in the deceived person. This rage must be repressed in the presence of the pretended “love,” especially if one is dependent, as a child is, on the person who is masquerading in this illusion of love.” p. 43

“As adults we don’t need unconditional love, not even from our therapists. This is a childhood need, one that can never be fulfilled later in life, and we are playing with illusions if we have never mourned this lost opportunity. But there are other things we can get from good therapists: reliability, honesty, respect, trust, empathy, understanding, and an ability to clarify their emotions so that they need not bother us with them. If a therapist promises unconditional love, we must protect ourselves from him, from his hypocrisy and lack of awareness.” p. 45

“Mary, age thirty-nine, would sometimes leave a session feeling content and understood after having come close to the core of herself. But then she would distract herself with a party or something equally unimportant to her at that moment, which would make her feel lonely and inadequate again. After a few days she would complain of self-alienation and emptiness, of once more having lost the way to herself. In this way she was actively, though unconsciously, provoking a situation that could demonstrate what used to happen to her as a child: Whenever she began, through her imaginative play, to have a true sense of herself, her parents would ask her to do something “more sensible”–to achieve something–and her inner world, which was just beginning to unfold, would be closed off to her. She reached to this interference by withdrawing her feelings and becoming depressed, because she could not take the risk of a normal reaction–rage, perhaps.” p. 54

“Depressive phases may last several weeks before strong emotions from childhood break through. It is as though the depression has held back the affect. When it can be experienced, insight and associations related to the repressed scenes follow, often accompanied by significant dreams. The patient feels fully alive again until a new depressive phase signals something new. This may be expressed in the following fashion: I no longer have a feeling of myself. How could it happen that I should lose myself again? I have no connection with what is within me. It is all hopeless… it will never be any better. Everything is pointless. I am longing for my former sense of being alive.” An emotional outbreak may follow, accompanied by strong, legitimate reproaches, and only after this outbreak will a new link with repressed experience become clear and new vitality be felt. As long as these reproaches are directed toward those who are responsible for harming us, a great relief is the result. If, however, they are unjust, or transferred onto innocent persons, the depression will continue until full clarification becomes possible.” p. 55

“The recollection of the pains of puberty, however–of not being able to understand or place our own impulses–is usually more accessible than the earliest traumas, which are often hidden behind the picture of an idyllic childhood or even behind an almost complete amnesia. This is perhaps one reason why adults less often look back nostalgically to the time of their puberty than to that of their childhood. The mixture of longing expectation and fear of disappointment that for most people accompanies the remembrance of festivities from childhood can perhaps be explained by their search for the intensity of feeling they lost back then.” p. 58

“A person seeking help is all too ready to give up his own pleasure in discovery and self-expression and accommodate himself to his therapist’s concepts, out of fear of losing the latter’s affection, understanding, and empathy, for which he has been waiting all his life. Because of his early experiences with his mother, he cannot believe that this need not happen. If he gives way to this fear and adapts himself, the therapy slides over into the realm of the false self, and the true self remains hidden and undeveloped. It is therefore extremely important that the therapist not allow his own needs to impel him to formulate connections that the patient himself is discovering with the help of his own feelings.” p. 59

“Recognizing the fragility of the healing process obviously does not mean that the therapist must adopt a mostly silent and hurtful attitude, but merely that he must exercise care in this respect. It will then become possible for old, unremembered situations to be experienced consciously in their full tragedy for the first time and be mourned at last. Apparently, for many people that works more effectively without the help of therapists.” p. 59

“It is part of the dialectic of the grieving process that the experience of pain both encourages and is dependent on self-discovery. If the psychotherapist invites the patient to share in his own “grandeur,” of if the patient is enabled to feel powerful as part of a therapeutic group, he will experience relief from his depression for a while, but the disturbance will still exist, appearing in a different guise for a time. Because grandiosity is the counterpart of depression within the narcissistic disturbance, the achievement of freedom from both forms of disturbance is hardly possible without deeply felt mourning about the situation of the former child. This ability to grieve–that is, to give up the illusion of his “happy” childhood, to feel and recognize the full extent of the hurt he has endured–can restore the depressive’s vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence on his Sisyphean task. If a person is able, during this long process, to experience the reality that he was never loved as a child for what he was but was instead needed and exploited for his achievements, success, and good qualities–and that he sacrificed his childhood for this form of love–he will be very deeply shaken, but one day he will feel the desire to end these efforts. He will discover in himself a need to live according to his true self and no longer be forced to earn “love” that always leaves him empty-handed, since it is given to his false self–something he has begun to identify and relinquish.” p. 60

“The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality–the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood. Once we have experienced and become familiar with this world, it is no longer strange and threatening. We no longer need to keep it hidden behind the prison walls of illusion. We know now who and what caused our pain, and it is exactly this knowledge that gives us freedom at last from the old pain.” p. 60-61

“How often depressive patients are aware that they have reacted oversensitively, and how much they reproach themselves for it. It is precisely their oversensitivity, shame, and self-reproach that form a continuous thread in their lives, unless they learn to understand to what these feelings actually relate. The more unrealistic such feelings are and the less they fit present reality, the more clearly they show that they are concerned with unremembered situations from the past that are still to be discovered. If the feeling that begins to arise is not experienced but reasoned away, the discovery cannot take place, and depression will triumph.” p. 61

“One might ask whether adaptation must necessarily lead to depression. Is it not possible, and do we not sometimes see, that emotionally conforming individuals may live quite happily? There were perhaps many such examples in the past. Within a culture that was shielded from other value systems, an adapted individual was, of course, not autonomous. He did not have an individual sense of identity (in our sense) that could have given him support, but he felt supported by the group. Today it is hardly possible for any group to remain completely isolated from others with different values. The individual must therefore find his support within himself if he is to avoid becoming the victim of various interests and ideologies.” p. 62-63

“Some children have latent powers to resist adaptation and become partially adapted. Older children, particularly as they reach puberty, may attach themselves to new values, which are often opposed to those of the parents. An adolescent may accept and conform to the ideals of a group of youths just as he did to those of his parents when he was younger. But since this attempt is not rooted in an awareness of his own true needs and feelings, he is again giving up and denying his true self in order to be accepted and loved, this time by a peer group. His renewed sacrifice will therefore not relieve his depression. He is not really himself, nor does he know or love himself: Everything he does is done in hopes of making somebody love him in the way he once, as a child, so urgently needed to be loved; but what could not be experienced at the appropriate time in the past can never be attained later on.” p. 63-64

“It is not only the “beautiful,” “good,” and pleasant feelings that make us really alive, deepen our existence, and give us crucial insight, but often precisely the unacceptable and unadapted ones from which we would prefer to escape: helplessness, shame, envy, jealousy, confusion, rage, and grief. These feelings can be experienced in therapy. When they are understood, they open the door to our inner world that is much richer than the “beautiful countenance”! Narcissus was in love with his idealized picture, but neither the grandiose nor the depressive “Narcissus” can really love himself. His passion for his false self makes impossible not only love for others but also, despite all appearances, love for the one person who is fully entrusted to his care: himself.” p. 66-67

“Disregard for those who are smaller and weaker is thus the best defense against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helplessness: it is an expression of this split-off weakness. The strong person who–because he has experienced it–knows that he, too, carries this weakness within himself does not need to demonstrate his strength through contempt.” p. 72

“The suffering that was not consciously felt as a child can be avoided by delegating it to one’s own children… it is not the frustration of his wish that is humiliating for a child, but the contempt shown for his person.” p. 73

“We cannot, simply by an act of will, free ourselves from repeating the patterns of our parents’ behavior–which we had to learn very early in life. We come free of them only when we can fully feel and acknowledge the suffering they inflicted on us. We can then become fully aware of these patterns and condemn them unequivocally.” p. 73

“Disrespect is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one’s own despised and unwanted feelings, which could trigger memories of events in one’s repressed history. And the fountainhead of all contempt, all discrimination, is the more or less conscious, uncontrolled, and covert exercise of power over the child by the adult. Expect in the case of murder or serious bodily harm, this unrestrained use of power is tolerated by society; what adults do to their child’s spirit is entirely their own affair, for the child is regarded as the parents’ property in the same way as the citizens of a totalitarian state are considered the property of its government.” p. 74

“Until we become sensitized to the small child’s suffering, this wielding of power by adults will continue to be regarded as a normal aspect of the human condition, for hardly anyone pays attention to it or takes it seriously.” p. 74

“It is very fortunate when our older children become aware of what we were doing and are able to tell us about it. We are then given the opportunity to recognize our failure and to apologize. Acknowledging what we have done may help them, at last, to throw off the chains of neglect, discrimination, scorn, and misuse of power that have been handed on for generations. When our children can consciously experience their early helplessness and rage, they will no longer need to ward off these feelings, in turn, with the exercise of power over others. In most cases, however, people’s childhood suffering remains affectively inaccessible and thus forms the hidden source of new and sometimes very subtle humiliation for the next generation. Various defense mechanisms will help to justify their actions: denial of their own suffering, rationalization (I owe it to my child to bring him up properly), displacement (it is not my father but my son who is hurting me), idealization (my father’s beatings were good for me), and more. Above all, there is the mechanism of turning repressed suffering into active behavior.” p. 75-76

“Ingmar Bergman, however, had another means, apart from projection and denial, of dealing with his suffering: He could make films and thereby delegate his unfelt feelings to the spectator. We, as the movie audience, are asked to endure those feelings that he, the son of such a father, could not experience overtly but nevertheless carried within himself. We sit before the screen confronted, the way that small boy once was, with all the cruelty “our brother” has to endure, and feel hardly able or willing to take in all this brutality with authentic feelings; we ward them off. Bergman also spoke regretfully of his failure to see through Nazism before 1945, although as an adolescent he often visited Germany during the Hitler period. I see this blindness as a consequence of his childhood. Cruelty was the familiar air he had breathed from early on, so why should cruelty and disdain for others have caught his attention?” p. 79

“If this is so with the most blatant examples of physical mistreatment, then how is emotional torment ever to be exposed, when it is less visible and more easily disputed? Who is likely to take serious notice of subtle discrimination, as in the example of the small boy and the ice cream But each patient’s therapy reveals endless comparable examples.” p. 79

“There are other ways of exploiting the child apart from the sexual: through brainwashing, for instance, which underlies both the “anti-authoritarian” and the “strict” upbringing. Neither form of rearing takes the child’s own needs into account. As soon as he is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his natural growth will be violently interrupted.” p. 81

“It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child’s curiosity, for example (there are questions one should not ask), and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning we offer him special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.” p. 81

“We find a similar example in the behavior of addicts. People who as children successfully repressed their intense feelings often try to regain–at least for a short time–their lost intensity of experience with the help of drugs or alcohol.” p. 81

**“If we want to avoid unconsciously motivated exploitation and disrespect of the child, we must first gain a conscious awareness of these dangers. Only if we become sensitive to the fine and subtle ways (as well as the more obvious but still denied ways) in which a child may suffer humiliation can we hope to develop the respect for him he will need from the very first day of his life. There are various means of developing this sensitivity. We may, for instance, observe children who are strangers to us and attempt to feel empathy for them in their situation. But we must, above all, come to have empathy for our own fate. Our feelings will always reveal the true story, which no one else knows and which only we can discover.” p. 81

“The urgent wish for a child… may express among other things the wish to have an available mother. Unfortunately, children are too often wished for only as symbols to meet repressed needs.” p. 83

**“… there are needs that can and should be satisfied in the present. Among these is every human being’s central need to express herself, to show herself to the world as she really is–in word, in gesture, in behavior, in art–in every genuine expression, beginning with the baby’s cry.” p. 83

“For the person who, as a child, had to hide her true feelings from herself and others, this first step into the open produces much anxiety, yet she feels a great need to throw over her former restraints. The first experiences do not always lead to freedom but quite often lead instead to a repetition of the person’s childhood situation, in which she will experience feelings of agonizing shame and painful nakedness as an accompaniment to her genuine expressions of her true self. With the infallibility of a sleepwalker, she will seek out those who, like her parents (though for different reasons), certainly cannot understand her. Because of her blindness caused by repression, she will try to make herself understandable to precisely these people–trying to make possible what cannot be.” p. 83-84

“If we start from the premise that a person’s whole development (and his balance, which is based upon it) is dependent on the way his mother experienced his expression of needs and sensations during his first days and weeks of life, then we must assume that it is here that the beginning of a later tragedy might be set. If a mother cannot take pleasure in her child as he is but must have him behave in a particular way, then the first value selection takes place for the child. Now “good” is differentiated from “bad,” “nice” from “nasty,” and “right” from “wrong.” Against this background will follow all his further valuation of himself.” p. 86

“Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents’ expectation. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child’s task or duty to satisfy his parent’s needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life’s earliest period, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy. They can be resolved only slowly, with the help of a revealing therapy.” p. 87

“Probably the greatest of wounds–not to have been loved just as one truly was–cannot heal without the work of mourning. It can be either more or less successfully resisted and covered up (as in grandiosity and depression), or constantly torn open again in the compulsion to repeat. We encounter this latter possibility in obsessive behavior and in perversion, where the mother’s (or father’s scornful reactions to the child’s behavior have stayed with him as repressed memory, stored up in his body. The mother often erected with surprise and horror, aversion and disgust, shock and indignation, or fear and panic to the child’s most natural impulses–his autoerotic behavior, investigation and discovery of his own body, urination and defecation, or his curiosity or rage in response to betrayal and injustice. Later, all these experiences remain closely linked with the mother’s horrified eyes. They drive the former child to obsessions and perversions in which the traumatic scenes that were endured can be reproduced. In order for pain to be avoided, the true meaning of these scenes must remain unrecognizable to the person himself.” p. 87-88

“Hesse, like so many gifted children, was so difficult for his parents to bear not despite but because of his inner riches. Often a child’s very gifts (his great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness–and his ability to be critical) will confront his parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations. These regulations must then be rescued at the cost of the child’s development. All this can lead to an apparently paradoxical situation when parents who are proud of their gifted child and who even admire him are forced by their own repression to reject, suppress, or even destroy what is best, because truest, in that child.” p. 101

**“Despite his enormous acclaim and success, and despite the Nobel Prize, Hesse in his mature years suffered from the tragic and painful state of being separated from his true self, to which doctors refer offhandedly as depression.” p. 103

“…his problems cannot be solved with words, but only through experience–not merely corrective experience as an adult but, above all, through a conscious experience of his early fear of his beloved mother’s contempt and his subsequent feelings of indignation and sadness. Mere words, however skilled the interpretation, will leave unchanged or even deepen the split between intellectual speculation and the knowledge of the body, the split from which he already suffers.” p. 104

“One can therefore hardly free an addict from the cruelty of his addiction by showing him how the absurdity, exploitation, and perversity of society cause our neuroses and perversions, however true this may be. The addict will love such explanations and eagerly believe them, because they spare him the pain of the truth. But things we can see through do not make us sick, although they may arouse our indignation, anger, sadness, or feelings of impotence. What makes us sick are those things we cannot see through, society’s constraints that we have absorbed through our parents’ eyes. No amount of reading or learning can free us from those eyes.” p. 104                                             

“Oppression and the forcing of submission do not begin in the office, factory, or political party; they begin in the very first weeks of an infant’s life.” p. 105

“The aim of therapy, however, is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient both to confront his own history and to grieve over it. The patient has to discover early memories within himself and must become consciously aware of his parents’ unconscious manipulation and contempt, so that he can free himself from them.” p. 106

“The contempt shown by many disturbed people may have various forerunners in their life history, but the function all expressions of contempt have in common is the defense against unwanted feelings. Contempt simply evaporates, having lost its point, when it is no longer useful as a shield–against the child’s shame over his desperate, unreturned love; against his feelings of inadequacy; or above all against his rage that his parents were not available. Once we are able to feel and understand the repressed emotions of childhood, we will no longer need contempt as a defense against them. On the other hand, as long as we despise the other person and over-value our own achievements (“he can’t do what I can do”), we do not have to mourn the fact that love is not forthcoming without achievement. Nevertheless, if we avoid this mourning it means that we remain at bottom the one who is despised, for we have to despise everything in ourselves that is not wonderful, good, and clever. Thus we perpetuate the loneliness of childhood: We despise the weakness, helplessness, uncertainty–in short, the child in ourselves and in others.” p. 107

“The contempt for others in grandiose, successful people always includes disrespect for their own true selves, as their scorn implies: “Without these superior qualities of mine, a person is completely worthless.” p. 107

“Contempt as a rule will cease with the beginning of mourning for the irreversible that cannot be changed, for contempt, too, has in its own way served to deny the reality of the past. It is, after all, less painful to think that the others do not understand because they are too stupid. Then one can make efforts to explain things to them, and the illusion of being understood (“if only I can express myself properly”) can be maintained. *If, however, this effort is relaxed, one is forced to realize that understanding was not possible, since the repression of the parents’ own childhood needs made them blind to their children’s needs.” p. 110

“Then there are people who can seem very friendly, if a shade patronizing, but in whose presence one feels as if one were nothing. They convey the feeling that they are the only ones who exist, the only ones who have anything interesting or relevant to say. The others can only stand there and admire them in fascination, or turn away in disappointment and sorrow about their own lack of worth, unable to express themselves in these persons’ presence. These people might be the children of grandiose parents, whom they as children had no hope of emulating; but later, as adults, they unconsciously pass on this atmosphere to those around them.” p. 111-112“People who discover their past with the help of their feelings, who learn through therapy to clarify these feelings, to look for their real causes, and to resolve the transference, will no longer be compelled to displace their hatred onto innocents in order to protect those who have in fact earned this hatred. They will be capable of hating what is hateful and of loving what deserves love.” p. 114

My Notes

• Didn’t think RIE approach was being explored with poor and young parents to full potential. (I am interested in this) p 10
• If she had known about RIE, she believes her own parenting would have been much easier (writing topic: I found parenting to be much easier than how I’d heard it described by most others) p 10
• Babies who are understood better are easier to care for. p 11
• Plea for improved subsidies for young children. p 15
• Importance of leadership and management when implementing RIE in facilities. p 15
• Growth of joy as parents learn about and implement RIE. p 15
• Importance of attachment theory. p 20
• Child care policies tend to focus on the needs of adults to the detriment of children. p 21
• Importance of self-directed play. p 22
• Rigorous system of evaluating effectiveness and scientific inquiry into gross motor development at Loczy. p 22
• Original nurses spent more time caring for linens than children. Fired all and hire new nurses they could train. p 23
• Children were able to be subjects, not objects at Loczy. had as much choice as possible, allowed to express themselves even if adult agenda had to be followed. p 24
• Continuity established by elaborate note-takeing shared between caregivers. p 24
• Gerber worked for some years as a child therapist (what type of therapist?). p 25
• Magda says lifestyle in US makes it very hard to raise a baby the way Emmi wanted. p 26
• Through DIP program, Magda developed way of helping parents observe their children. Also modeled respectful interaction with infants without disempowering or deskilling their carers. (I want to become skilled at this). p 26
• Taught when and how to intervene by being available without being intrusive. p 16
• Very different than teaching parents how to work with a generic baby. p 26
• Children have a right to information and autonomy, as well as consistent loving care. Adults must accept responsibility of authority and be honest about it while allowing the child to express anger or be upset. p 27
• High rate of foster/adoption placement breakdown, unless it is early adoption of healthy infants. 🙁 p 29
• “Observing, thinking, caring for children and teaching were not separate activities to [Pikler & Gerber] but part of a unified approach. They had to find better ways to care for children because the children were there to be cared for; they could not wait.” p 30
• Policies promote paid work as the way out of poverty. This means that day care is required. Subsidies are a priority subsequently. p 31
• Pre-school is provided free for 3-4 year olds but tends to take place in schools. Concerns about this because formalized schooling is known to not be good for young children. p 31
• Little collective responsibility for children in western countries. They are instead seen to be the responsibility of the parents. Places a lot of economic pressure on families. p 33
• Can tell if people are authentically applying RIE principles rather than imitation without understanding. Sometimes people do things very differently but she can tell they understand the principles. p 37
• Basic principle is to trust baby’s inborn capacities. Our role is to create an environment where the child can best do what he wants naturally. This is very difficult in US where entire society is pushing you constantly. p 37 
• “Through regular routines, babies eventually learn to anticipate what is expected of them. This is the beginning of discipline.” p 44
• “Knowing when to give infants freedom and when to introduce limits is most important, and is the backbone of the RIE approach. We need to remember that limits function as traffic signals, keeping things flowing smoothly between family members. With this framework are those things a child is expected to do (non-negotiable areas), what she is allowed to do (negotiable areas), what is tolerated (“I don’t really like that, but I can understand why you need to do it”), and what is forbidden. These are the parameters of discipline.” p 44
• “If a child spends hours playing uninterruptedly, he will be much more willing to cooperate with the demands of his parent. If he doesn’t have to fight for autonomy, he can comfortably relinquish it once in a while.” p 44
• “We at RIE would like to see parent support happen as a by-product of our classes, but it is not our main purpose. Our classes are designed to be infant as well as adult-oriented, in that we focus on the infant’s initiations, needs and cues, demonstrating sensitive and appropriate ways of responding to them. We try to model ways in which the needs of o=infants and parents can be synchronized. We believe this will help parents more in the long run than if we were to emphasize solely parent-support activities. Many parents also bring with them the expectation that they will receive quick and ready explanations and solutions about parenting and infancy. In our hectic world the standard way to learn about anything is to pick up a “how-to” book on a given subject and start reading, or to go to a class and have the instructor tell us what to do. In my opinion, this is short-term learning, and it usually doesn’t work.”
• RIE parent-infant classes, by their very nature, rely on and encourage long-term learning. Our classes are eight weeks long. Effective parenting cannot be learned or “taught” in eight weeks. The goal in our classes is for parents to observe and really see their infants. The classes are divided into two sections. In the first, parents ease their infants into a prepared environment, then move back to a spot where they can sit quietly and watch as the RIE demonstrator interacts with the infants. We ask parents to try to remain in the same place throughout the observation period, so that their babies will always be able to find them. This gives the babies the requisite security they need in order to move away from their parents, accept the attention of the demonstrator, and get involved in exploring the environment and the other infants. The fact that that parent is there allows the baby to let go of the parent. The RIE demonstrator will meanwhile pay full attention to the babies, responding to their cues, and helping them either directly or by not helping them. With her soft voice and slow movements she will try to create an atmosphere of peace and quiet. After observation of about one hour, the RIE instructor will lead a parent discussion to talk over issues that have arisen during the class as well as at home.” p 46
• Story of swim class that babies did not enjoy but parents did and didn’t seem to notice their babies not enjoying it. p 47
• “I recommend that parents form small groups in which their babies are the “actors” and “scriptwriters.” The parents can then watch, learn, and enjoy.” p 47
• “During the RIE parent-infant classes we are trying to impart a quality of experience — a way of relating that can be used at all levels of growth. In the long run, our goal is to help parents learn to live and let live with their infants and later their older children.” p 47
• Difficult to meet needs of infant because though usually well meaning, caregivers are generally low pay, low status, few models, poor training, high turnover, etc. p 48
• Focus is on two areas: 1) time spent with adult during caring, 2) time spent alone, freely exploring the environment. Only a child who receives undivided attention fro his educarer during all routine caregiving activities will be free and interested to explore his environment without needing too much intervention from the educarer.” p 48
• Difference between good average carer and trained educarer (from page 49-50):

 

Good Average Caregiver	Trained Educarer
May rush through caring activities in order to get ready for the more valued time of following a curriculum, lesson plan or providing some structured stimulation.	Uses the time that must be spent with the child anyway as a potential source of valued learning experience.
Rely on infant curricula, books and packaged programs as a prescription to teach, drill and speed up new skills in the areas of gross motor, fine motor, social/emotional or language development.	Trusts the infants’ abilities to initiate their own activities, choose from available objects, and work on their own projects without interruption.
Teaches and encourages postures and means of locomotion that the infants are not yet able to do on their own (thus hampering free movement and exploration and sometimes even creating bodily discomfort).	Provides appropriate space for the infant to freely initiate his own movements without interference, thus helping the infant feel comfortable, competent and self-reliant.
Attention is focused on the elicited response to her or his stimulation.	Attention is focused upon observing the whole child, his reaction to the caregiving person, to the environment, and to his peers, thus learning about the child’s personality and needs.
Selects and puts objects/toys in the infants’ hands.	Places the objects/toys so the infant must make an effort to reach and grasp. The child work towards what she or he wants.
Encourages dependency by assuming an active role, such as rescuing a child in distress or helping her to solve her problems.	Waits to see if the child is capable of consoling himself and solving his own problems, thus encouraging autonomy.
May often use bottles and/or pacifiers to soothe a crying child, creating a false oral need for food or sucking.	Accepts the child’s right to show both positive and negative feelings. Does not want to stop the crying, but rather tries to understand and attend to the child’s real needs, such as sleeplessness, hunger or cold. If infant soothes himself by sucking his thumb, this is accepted as a positive, self-comforting activity.
Often restricts infant-infant interaction, such as infants touching each other, for fear of them hurting each other.	Facilitates interactions by closely observing, in order to know when to intervene and when not to.
In a situation of conflict, resolves the problem by separating, distracting, or deciding who should have the toy or object in question.	Comments, “Both you, John, and you, Anne, want that toy.” Often after such impartial comments, minor conflicts resolve themselves.
May become aggressive in controlling an “aggressor,” thereby reinforcing the aggressive behavior.	Models appropriate behavior by touching the aggressive child and quietly saying something like, “Easy, gently… nice.”
May rush to pick up, to rescue and to console the “victim” of the “aggressor”.	Squats down, touches and strokes the “victim” saying, “Gently now, nice.” By concurrently stroking and talking to both “victim” and “aggressor,” the educarer is modeling and consoling both children without reinforcing a pattern of becoming a “victim.”
Likes to have more people or helpers in the room.	Wants to become the steady person to his or her own small group of about four infants.
Gets exhausted from picking up one crying child and putting down another, as if extinguishing one fire after another.	Calmly observes and can often prevent the “fire.”
May scoop up an infant unexpectedly from behind, thereby startling, interrupting and creating resistance in the infant.	Always tells the infant before she or he does anything with him or her, and thus gets cooperation.

 

• Offering high-quality care using RIE is easier than offering low-quality care. p 51
• “Appropriate curriculum for infants should not be a special teaching plan added to their daily activities, but rather it should be incorporated in the infants’ every experience.” p 54
• This must be in the context of respectful relationships between adults, as well as between an adult carer and an infant. p 54
• “Essential to best practice is comprehensive knowledge of the little recognized stages of natural motor development in infants.” p 56
• Charts by Klara Pap of natural gross motor development. p 56
• Magda believed strongly that effective teaching comes through demonstration and internalization of ways of working. p 57 
• “As RIE’s purpose is to foster the development of healthy, competent, cooperative, creative children, taking an infant’s need for both interdependence and independence into consideration, a model of a cooperative relationship must be adopted from the beginning of the infant/adult relationship.” p 57
• “Signs of the infant’s growing competence may not only be unnoticed and unappreciated by the adult, but even thwarted if the old model of “baby as dependent” remains. And if the infant does not see recognition of her competence reflected in the adult’s eyes, then it could go unnoticed and unappreciated by the infant herself.” p 58
• “Interference has a negative effect on the qualities of grace, surety, and the child’s sensory awareness of her own movements. In addition, development of initiative, judgement, coping skills and satisfaction in controlling one’s own efforts are rooted in early, natural, unassisted motor development supported by a safe environment and a secure relationship.” p 58
• “RIE values freedom of emotion as well as of motion, accepting the full range of a child’s feelings with equanimity. In time, the child can come to recognize them, and be able to deal with them in a constructive way. As Jackins has argued, crying is not the hurt, it is the release or healing of the hurt.” p 60
• “I often wonder if in attempting to teach infants how to play, adults foster short attention spans. Infants engaged in the discovery process have long attention spans.” p 73
• RIE recommends being specific when making comments about play (ex. I see you are very interested in rolling that ball). This sends message we are really paying attention and helps with language development.
• Relationship-based philosophy: “I want to know and understand who you are and I’m prepared to help you understand and know who I am.” p 84
• Many adults who work with infants believe they already know what’s best for infants. p 84 
• “It’s interesting to note that when a caregiver becomes skilled in this approach with children, it also enables her to create a more respectful relationship with adults.” p 84
• “Diapering should be a pleasant time for both the adult and the child. When adults expect that the child can and will be a willing participant, it becomes an opportunity for developing a close relationship. There are times when the child might fuss or giggle around and then the sensitive adult slows down and allows the child some time to adjust and help with the task. The child’s sense of self begins to emerge during this kind of caring routine. During meaningful interactions, the child may attempt to engage the adult in a playful exchange, similar to teasing. This can become an opportunity for the child to learn to negotiate if the adult joins in the play. Adults who are focused on the task rather than the relationship feel rushed and often miss the child’s attempt to engage them.” p 87
• “Toddlers are more active than infants but are not yet pre-schoolers. Many programs make the common mistake of creating a toddler environment and curriculum similar to the pre-school program. While it appears toddlers are ready to learn through group activities, this is not always true. In an effort to control the active toddler who is not ready to work in groups, an inexperienced caregiver is often drawn into “entertaining” the children. When a child does not participe, she sees the child as difficult and might take inappropriate measures to discipline the child. The can often weaken the adult/child relationship because the toddler, at the critical stage “autonomy vs. shame and doubt,” feels shame or anger, and the child is labeled difficult in the caregiver’s mind.” p 90
• “Caregivers must be emotionally healthy and be open to diversity, accepting of each family’s unique culture and lifestyle. Likewise, caregivers must be committed to their own professional growth and development.” p 90
• “RIE works on the premise that learners across the life span take a more active role in the educational process if they learn in relationships with each other. Those who teach infant caregivers attempt to engage students actively in their education, and involving parents of very young children in the educational arena is a widely accepted strategy in the US. A collaborative learning model can be more effective than the limited “professional expert” model and, indeed, that model has been questioned in complex Western societies as our understanding of diversity and difference has increased.” p 93
• “Babies from birth on try to communicate how they feel. If your attitude is, “I cannot know automatically what you need, please tell me”, then the baby will learn to give you cues, and a dialogue will develop. If, on the other hand, a mother superimposes her interpretation of the baby’s problems, the infant will unlearn to expect appropriate responses to her hees, and learn to accept what mother offers. This is the difference between being understood and misunderstood. Being understood creates security, trust and confidence. Being misunderstood creates doubt both in yourself and in the problem.” Magda Gerber. p 96
• “Parents are treated very gently. Certain expectations of the supportive environment need to be articulated as “ground rules” for adult interactions. Modeling the respectful approach, staff do not judge, directly admonish or blame parents. Parents may choose to use self-reflection and also may choose to share insights with the group without judgement or criticism imposed on one another. No one ever says: “Don’t do that; you will damage your child” or “This is the right way to do it.” The parent-educator brings parents’ attention to the large and small changes in their child’s abilities and competencies. Naturally, the parents are already in communication with their child and can often translate a child’s need (by the tone of a cry from example) to the demonstrator. Noticing that they already have special knowledge about their child’s needs is a positive reinforcement of parenting abilities.” p 102-103
• “Always the emphasis is on the parent’s need to make conscious choices, to examine why they make specific choices, and the necessity of doing what feels comfortable and right to the parent. A parent attempting to adopt a pedagogical method that is unfamiliar and not fully understood cannot help but give confused messages to a baby. It is better for both parent and infant if the parent does what feels natural and at the same time self-observes, becoming more conscious of her/his own behavior and trying to discover why a particular response or reaction feels right. Is it also important for the facilitator to support this process in which parents become clearer about what they value or appreciate, and observer how the baby actually responds to their behavior.” p 103
• “16 to 24 months: As baby gets closer to talking, mom increasing expects the baby to alert her to problems, rather than anticipating or decoding baby’s expressions or gestures. The great day comes when the toddler realizes he can get an adult involved in a verbal dialogue. “What’s dat?” (pointing again), “What’s dat?” ad infinitum. The child can now capture and direct the adult’s attention whenever and wherever he wants to. The power of words!” p 105. (Never heard any other parenting book talk about this).
• “An expert parent-educator/facilitator can really encourage animated and honest discussion between parents, even when their viewpoints differ. This is particularly valuable in ensuring the inclusion of families and children from diverse communities or who have special educational or physical needs. The key seems to be valuing all contributions and validating them as a reflection of each individual’s experience. Exchanging ideas and ways of dealing with the same problem gives parents a chance to consider the possibility of alternative solutions.” p 106
• “Parents are encouraged to think and talk about what feels comfortable for them and for their babies. We discuss where these feelings come from: our own forgotten infancy. parenting we observed or experienced as older children or as siblings, what we have heard and read, and our socio-cultural traditions and values. We encourage parents to parent by choice, as they feel, to be sincere and authentic, and know why what they do is right for them and for their baby. We encourage thinking and mindful decision-making about parenting, rather than just reacting or letting whatever happens happen. No one can be totally consistent, that wouldn’t even be helpful to babies or parents, but it is possible to be more consistent and more content when we are doing what feels right to us. In RIE parent-infant guidance classes, parents become the experts on their own baby.” p 107
• “Intervention must highlight the strengths that families have, rather than underscoring the weaknesses. RIE’s non-deficit model features empowerment as a process of change, over time, for parents of young children from any section of society.” p 107
• Example of government funded RIE program in California. p 107
• Examples of what parents learned during the program 🙂 p 108
• “Expression of alternative viewpoints is encouraged and so adults learn the value of conflict when generating multiple perspectives.” p 109
• “The essentials for this learning experience are: small groups, a long, unhurried time, a carefully prepared, safe space, a trained parent-educator/facilitator and demonstrator, and a relaxed, sharing atmosphere. Within this context the child can be truly valued just as he or she is. And the parent can be valued as well. Parents see the weekly gathering of families as a very special opportunity for peaceful checking-in on their lives and relationships. Many find support for their “authentic” expression via mutual sharing of concerns in the safe space where there’s nothing to do. Rather, it is a time to be, to connect with others and their own baby, especially for those returning with their second or third child.” p 110
• Magda taught that the struggle is the essence of learning. p 113
• Favorite Article: Give Them What You Want Them To Give The Babies. p 114
• Magda challenged people’s thinking yet validated their experiences and thinking. p 119
• “How they see the child is how the child will become. Understand their vision of the child and help them see yours.” The lesson of Magda Gerber. p 119
• RIE on the outside: They knew the words, went through the motions, but failed to internalize the philosophy. p 120. Understand their vision and help them see yours. 
• Lessons
  • 1. Give the adult what you want them to give to the babies.
  • 2. Create an environment where each adult feels emotionally safe, yet intellectually challenged.
  • 3. Work hard to understand each person and help them to understand themselves.
  • 4. Work hard to develop the skills and confidence it takes to share the philosophy with others. 
  • 5. Understand your students and be responsive to their issues and concerns. Be prepared to adjust your course, lecture or workshop to meet their needs. 
  • 6. Understand their vision of the child and help them understand yours. 
  • 7. Remember: you can’t teach RIE to the mother in line at the grocery store but you can acknowledge she has a hard job… and you can let her go in front of you in line. 
• It is the most vulnerable children who could benefit most from RIE. p 127
• The voices of very young children tend to be silent in the marketplace. p 128
• Yet services tend to be consumer driven, intentionally. p 129
• “… affluent societies tend to exclude and constrain very young children, in many ways creating a dependency upon adults that is neither protective nor facilitative of growth.” p 132
• “Parenting is the most important influence on children and young people’s outcomes. We need to shift away from associating parenting support with crisis interventions to a more consistent offer of parenting support throughout a young person’s life.” p 133
• Emmi Pikler and Magda Gerber were remarkably silent about abuse.. more about this. p 134
• Tendency to split caring and education, particularly in early years and why this is a problem. p 135
• Use of caregiving routines as the central element in learning and development of babies is very difficult to find in practice, though often recommended by child care theorists and trainers. p 139

My Notes

• “Many parents, teachers, physicians, and other professionals spend time and energy trying to speed up development, to force children to do what they cannot do, or to teach them what they are not yet capable of. How sad. Nobody gains except the many who take money by manufacturing gadgets which supposedly speed up the natural developmental process.”
• “While some people may respond to the voice of reason and begin to question what is really best for their infants, I fear many more will be lured by multi-colored parachutes and flash cards of painters and brain parts. As a result, more and more babies will be tossed up in the air, taught irrelevant information, treated like objects, and fed data like computers. It is like force feeding the child with food he or she cannot digest.”
• “Parents may try so hard to “teach” their children that they do not realize just what the children are learning from them. When infants do not understand what is being asked of them, all they learn is to respond to their parents’ cues, however unintentional they may be — facial expression, tone of voice, subtle gestures. Infants learn to perform, like elephants in the circus—not appreciated for just being themselves, but for doing tricks.”
• “Parents may not realize the high price they may have to pay for their ambitious endeavors to speed up infancy and interfere with natural growth. They may never connect early stressful training with problems frequently encountered later on: from sleeping and eating disorders to nervous and self-destructive behaviors (hair-pulling, nail-biting, stuttering, nervous tics, or anorexia); from disinterest, bored and unmotivated students to early school dropouts and drug abusers. While the effect of any environment is dependent on the child’s personality, vulnerability and resilience some of these children may need intensive psychotherapy at some point. But I have yet to hear of a single case in which a person (coming from loving parents and an average, responsive environment) sought therapy because he or she had not been taught enough during infancy.” p 152-153
• “I consider safety the prerequisite for implementing the RIE approach. By safety I mean an environment which is so totally safe that, even without adult supervision, the infant or toddler would be totally safe…” p 157
• “I wish children could grow according to their natural pace: sleep when sleepy, wake up when rested, eat when hungry, cry when upset, express feelings, play and explore without being unnecessarily interrupted; in other words, be allowed to grow and blossom as each was meant to.” p 163
• Recommended reading from Magda: The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm (purchased)
• Favorite Article: Does RIE Make a Difference? p 171

My Notes

• “ …. the seed of natural development is in every living being; be it plant, animal, or human it does not need to be “helped” to develop.” Charlotte Sever. p 1
• “Emmi Pikler proved that teaching a baby something she could learn by herself was not only unnecessary but harmful, depriving the beginning being of experimenting independently and of the energy this involves, as well as the delight of reaching a goal. Elsa Gindler and Heinrich Jacoby recognized the damage brought about by early interference with the baby and the growing child, interference which inhibited his curiosity and spontaneity….” Charlotte Sever. p 1
• “The most important thing has not yet been mentioned; namely that an infant’s own movements, the development of these movements and every detail of this development are a constant source of joy to him.” Emmi Pikler. p 12
• “If one does not interfere, an infant will learn to turn, roll, creep on the belly, go on all fours, stand, sit, and walk with no trouble. This will not happen under pressure, but out of her own initiative — independently, with joy, and pride in her achievement — even though she may sometimes get angry, and cry impatiently.” Emmi Pikler. p 12
• “What is most important, however, is not the result, but the way to it. This learning process will play a major role in the whole later life of the human being. Through this kind of development, the infant learns his ability to do something independently, through patient and persistent effort.” Emmi Pikler. p 12
• “Unfortunately, many mothers don’t sufficiently appreciate their infant’s efforts to move. They don’t even notice that they discourage their infant’s development. On the contrary, they are usually even proud of what they are doing. While on the one hand these mothers obstruct the unfolding of movement and don’t allow the stretching, rolling and creeping, on the other hand they push an infant into movements which she cannot manage at that time.They do not allow a child to quietly experiment while lying on her back, but, instead, turn her over, sit her up, stand her up, walk her around supported by adult’s hands. Mothers urge these movements at the time when they think, “This would be the right time to learn them.”” Emmi Pikler. p 12-13
• “It would be better if mothers did not brag to each other–in this way, for example: “My daughter never crawled,” or “My son does not want to turn himself from the back to the belly, he already clings to the edge of the pram in order to sit up. That’s what interests him.” It would be better if those mothers would think about what mistake caused this behavior–why certain development stages in the motor development have been left out. The pride of these mothers arises from an error. Each believes that her child develops differently from others because her child is skillful, is smart. It is true, however, that the smarter a child is, the more joy that child will find in development of movements and the more quickly progress will be make in learning more and more movements–in other words, the more quickly he will make progress in motor development.” Emmi Pikler. p 15
• “A growing tree diverges from its upright direction only when either internal disease or external circumstances hinder its upright growing. Motor development also is an organic chain of specific developmental stages. It, too, can be diverted from its course only through diseases or through circumstances which disturb it from the outside. Thus, the motor development of an infant will only get off course if that infant cannot move in the way she wants.” Emmi Pikler. p 15
• “We must not demand from the child that his clothes look as though they came fresh from the closet, or the child will become like the clothes: stiff and lifeless.” p 15
• “We hinder the child when we encourage it, spur it on and ask it to perform certain movements. Also when we acknowledge certain “accomplishments” in an exaggerated way. As an example: a toddler tries things out, experiments attentively, with pleasure, immersed in himself. He is the middle of attempting something in which he might be successful… maybe. But in this moment the storm breaks! “Look, the baby is standing!” – “He can stand already!” “Do it again!” “Stand up again.” “Show daddy how a little boy stands!” “Come, I’ll help you!” “Come, give me your hand!” The effect of all this incalculable. The child’s attention to what he is attempting and his experimenting with his movements is being distracted. He discovers that he can influence his audience with what he does. It is commonly known what toddlers are capable of doing to please their audience! As a consequence, the child will not experiment with what is called for by his development and its moment-to-moment condition; he will not try out what gives him pleasure, but that which he assumes will please the adults.” Emmi Pikler. p 15-16
• “Taking both hand of the infant, pulling it up and forcing it into a standing position: “The baby is standing!” The child is standing in a forced, insecure position, but is standing. (Later she laughs, is even happy, seeing that the adults that surround her are happy, acknowledging and praising her accomplishment.) The child, however, cannot correct the cramped, stiff, bad standing. She is not mature enough, either physically or mentally. If she were, she would get up by iherself without being forced. When forced by others’ hands, the child cannot correct the mistakes of her “accomplishment.” Getting used to it is all that can be done, and establishing a physical posture in accordance with what has become habitual. When mature enough to experiment with a better posture, the child is no longer bothered by the bad posture. Even worse: the more she stands, the bigger her body gets, the greater the ailments grow. Often the arch of the foot lessens of does not develop at all. The knees are straight (too straight: pushed backwards) and the area of the sacrum is out of line with the rest of the body; the back becomes round; etc. The weaker joints get loose from too big a burden and lose their original elasticity.” Emmi Pikler. p 16
• “If an otherwise healthy infant is “bored”, “bad-tempered”, or “high-strung” (as it is called) these tendencies always are the result of the behavior of the environment — or, to be more percise, of mistakes in upbring. What mistakes are these? Usually the child is seen as a toy or as a “doll”, rather than a human being… “ Emmi Pikler. p 18 — This whole section is so, so good.
• “Many mothers believe that they are caring for their children best when they do everything as fast a possible: “One, two, three and done!” That’s not the way to be. Whenever we are doing something with a child, we should never be in a hurry. Even in the speed of our motions we should adjust to the child, who prefers it when we are calm and take time with him…” Emmi Pikler. p 21
• “We do not force a toy on a child; we don’t put anything into his hand….We never take over a child’s playing, and never expect a child to play in the manner we imagine she should….” Emmi Pikler. p 23
• Favorite Article: Forty Years at Loczy. By Judit Falk

My Notes

• Read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving (1956). p 6
• Favorite Article: Day Care Centers, by Magda Gerber. p24
  • Wondering how much of this is still true?
• “What are the infant’s needs, beyond those for food, rest, warmth, and hygiene? Most people would respond, “love and cognitive stimulation.” They try to meet the need for love by rocking, fondling, and body contact. They try to meet the need for cognitive stimulation with objects, teaching materials, and lesson plans. They separate education from routine caregiving activities.” Magda Gerber. p 25
• Emmi Pikler advocated for non-interference in gross motor development. She suggested that “by allowing the child freedom of movement, parents would develop respect for their baby’s individual tempo and style in other areas of development as well.” p 52
• At Loczy there is “careful organization of space, time, and interpersonal relations.” p 53
• “Respect is the guiding principle in situations other than routine care. It can best be defined as selective intervention and is based upon sensitive observation. Knowing when not to interfere is often more important and generally more difficult than indiscriminate intervention.” p 56
• Gross Motor Development Section: “…a child restricted from moving freely is deprived of the long hours of exercising in transitional postures before mastering the next developmental skill.” p 59
• Hazards of overstimulation: “Until recently, infant programs were analogous to infant stimulation programs. The appeal of infant teaching and stimulation appears to be undergoing reconsideration, with concerns about the hazards of overstimulation now being expressed. We are not moving into a period where “the term ‘infant stimulation’ is misleading and should not be used in identifying educational programs appropriate for young infants and their parents” (Bromwitch). The basic philosophy of Loczy could be represented by bruner” “There is inherent in the description given of the growth of infant skill and emphasis on self-initiated, intentional behavior. Surely the chief practical recommendation one would have to make… is that the infant should be encouraged to venture, rewarded for venturing his own acts, and sustained against distraction or premature interferences in carrying them out. It is a point of view very alien from such ideas as presenting “deprivation’ or providing enrichment, both of which are highly passive conceptions”.” p 60
• Loczy guidelines are:
  • Basic trust in the child as a self-learner and initiator
  • An environment for the child that is physically safe, emotionally nurturing and consistent
  • Intimate human relation with one primary carer
  • Concept-free observation of the child
  • Minimal interruption of the child at play; large amounts of time allotted to play
  • Independence for the child in movement, choice, activities
  • Involvement of the child in all activities with the carer
  • Respect for all human beings, including infants
• “And the infant? What does he say? He adjusts or he revolts. When he adjusts and keeps quiet, it is taken as proof that what we did was good for him. And when he cries, the circle begins. We put him down or pick him up; we rock him or ignore him, feed him, play with him, put him in a bouncer, give him a new toy. One sometimes wonders — the infant must be miraculously resilient, or is he? If we look around the adult population, we wonder if perhaps we pay a high price for adapting to such a confused upbringing.” Magda Gerber. p 64
• “We are a preventive mental health program, not a day care center.” Magda Gerber. p 65
• “…selective intervention… that allows the child to reveal himself, to make his own choices, and to evolve his own style of mastery.” Magda Gerber. p 66
• “Infant and parent education as well as training and consultation occur simultaneously. They are interwoven, creating the matrix of the DOP. It is one thing to present a philosophy of child rearing, but no matter how impressive it may sound, it is quite another to apply it in everyday situations. This is why our program is based on demonstration. Though directly we only reach small numbers of infants and mothers and trainees, we are a visible model which shows how respect is our guideline every time an adult talks to, cares for, and even thinks of infants.” Magda Gerber. p 66
• Favorite Article: Notes on the Demonstration Infant Program
• “Many parents feel weary from the relentless ongoing life with a dependent child. Parents have needs too, which often get shortcut when faced with a nagging child. There is an easier way of life with a child, which is demonstrated in the process of the class.” Phyllis Sletten. p 70 
• “In our California programs, the emphasis is similarly on obwervation, anticipation, and selective intervention. Observing her child helps the mother or carer to learn about individual characteristics of her child adn to realize what she can reasonably expect of him at any given developmental level. This, in turn, helps the mother synchronize her behavior with the child’s needs, tempo and style. Anticipating each other’s reactions fosters mutual understanding, acceptance, and basic trust for both mother and child; thus, anticipation becomes the forerunner of communication. Selective intervention means knowing when not to intervene, and this is more difficult than intervening indiscriminately.” Maga Gerber. p 79
• “… our goals are influenced by our concept of an ideal human being as one who has some or many of the following characteristics: realistic trust in himself and his environment, perception of his inner needs and ability to communicate them, the ability to make choices for himself, which includes knowing and accepting the consequences of his choices, flexibility, and the capacity to learn from past experiences, the ability to deal actively with the present and play for the future, and free access to his creative talents and resources. Further, he is goal-oriented and also enjoys the process of problem solving, whether physical, emotional, or cognitive. Identification with these ideals implies that we have to critically examine child-rearing practices in order to determine which would facilitate and /or hinder the emergence of the desired characteristics in infancy.” Magda Gerber. p 79
• Favorite Article: Form Stress to Distress
• “Parents are the first and most important teachers of their children. But parents have gotten so busy and are trying so hard to “teach” their children that they do not realize just what the children are learning from them. Children who are taught to pick the “right” picture or give the “right” answer learn to please. They do not understand the questions, which have no meaning for them, so they cannot make a real choice’ all they learn is to respond to their parent’s cues. Parents may, even unintentionally, give clues such as facial expression, tone of voice, or subtle gestures. Infants learn to perform, like an elephant in the circus who is not appreciated for just being an elephant, but for doing tricks.” Magda Gerber. p 82-83
• “On the other hand, our children have never been taught to perform certain skills which are generally taught. Loczy has encountered a great deal of criticism and controversy on this point. Yet we insist on continuing not to teach the children these skills. What are the skills we refuse to teach our children? The infant is never put in a more advanced position, in order to promote gross motor development, than he is able to attain by himself from a basic supine position. His attention is never drawn to a toy by placing the toy in his hand, or having it dangle over his head, thus compelling him to notice it. Finally, we also make a point of not including social contact between the infants, in conformity with adult ideas. As a matter of principle, we refrain from teaching skills and activities which under suitable conditions will evolve through the child’s own initiative and independent activity. Naturally, we must provide the children suitable conditions — that is, freedom for activity and adequate space. Their environment must be stable, varied, and colorful.” Emmi Pikler. p 87
• Favorite Article: Forms of Hospitalism in Our Days, Emmi Pikler
• “A caretaker who does not usually look after a child will not know the child entrusted to her; a nurse who takes turns in varying groups does not really know any of the children. If she is competent and dedicated, she may get a look from one child, a smile from another, some cooperation from a third child, and peace and quiet in the whole group; but she will not even realize that no real contact has been established with the children. The interactions which may be formed are mostly scanty and stereotyped. She does not know their habits, nor do the children know hers; she is not aware what their crying or gestures mean and is accordingly unable to respond to the needs of the children. Hence, the signs emitted by the children become scarce and increasingly scant, while the caretaker’s work gets mechanical, often indifferent.” Judit Falk. p 120
• Favorite Article: Educaring, Interpersonal Neuroscience, and Selective Intervention, Ruth Anne Hammond
• If a parent had a less than sensitive caregiver as a child, they may struggle to understand and respond to their babies’ needs. p 151
• “I want to emphasize that all parents do the very best they know how to dom and never, ever, should be subject to negative judgements; this is never helpful. They need to receive the same compassion and space for growth that we advocate for infants. There is an attachment history inside every person. This includes facilitators, and some insight into one’s own attachment style is important before embarking on helping others.” Ruth Anne Hammond. p 151
• Parents who want to do better than what they received will look for info in books, etc. Gerber realized this is not always the best way to learn. Her method of meeting to learn to sensitively observe their babies was brilliant and is very effective. p 151
• “What is remarkable about this format is the level of protection given to the infants’ autonomy. By discouraging the parents from stimulating the children during class, Magda gave the parents the opportunity to see what their infants were interested in without outside suggestion or coercion, what they could do on their own without help, and how they related to the other infants and adults in the group. We call this quiet observation time” because the adults still themselves to make way for the infants or toddlers to find out what interests them without coercion of anky kind.” Ruth Anne Hammond. p 151
• Parents are often surprised by how capable their infants are and become advocates for children’s rights. p 152
• “If a child is cared for with consistency and sensitivity to her needs and capacities, she will develop securely, with an assumption that people can be trusted to help in times of need and to collaborate in creating happiness. If a child’s important caregivers are not consistently available to meet the child’s physical and emotional needs, insecure patterns will form. The child will become a person with less trust in others and himself, and be less able to handle stress and live happily. Ruth Anne Hammond. p 152
• Baby learns about his emotions by seeing them reflected on his mother’s face, if she is sufficiently sensitive and attuned. If he doesn’t have this experience in early life, he may never be as understanding or able to read other’s emotions. p 154
• Even adults need others to interactively co-regulate, though different than ways of young children. p 155
• Quality of early care is extremely important. Advocated delaying the return to work as long as possible. p 156
• Selective intervention. Adults can pay attention to the child and refrain from intervening when the child shows a tolerable level of distress as this can help the child to learn to manage challenges on her own. p 156
• Poorly coordinated interventions interfere with a baby’s ability to self-regulate. p 156
• Baby learns to make sense of experiences through the mother’s response. If the mother is overly concerned, the baby can learn that. If the mother is calm, the baby learns that. A mother who is sensitively observing, not doing anything, is still felt by the baby as true support. p 157
• As caregivers, we should give our attention to the meaning that children seem to be making. Our mere attention to their process determines what qualities are encoded in their brains. p 157 
• The main task of parents and caregivers is to be connected enough to be able to see if our baby needs help or not. p 159
• It is more important to support emotional connections than cognitive learning. p 159
• “… it is more important to read the baby than to read to the baby.” p 159
• “… if self-regulation is composed of a combination of co-regulation and auto-regulation, the sensitive adult is actually co-regulating when allowing an infant a chance to auto-regulate. Allowing a child (when he is not stressed to the far reaches of his regulatory boundaries) appropriate opportunities to auto-regulate is not abandonment; it is discernment. It is, as Magda coined it, selective intervention.” Ruth Anne Hammond. p 159
• Favorite Article: When We Touch the Infant’s Body, bu Judit Falk. p 162
• “High-quality care enables the child, by his innate ability, to get to know about “live in” his body, to find pleasure in its functioning and to learn from it, and to realize that his skin forms a natural boundary between himself and the rest of the world.” Judit Falk. p 162
• An infant learns to make sense of his experiences of his body sensations and needs through interaction with the caregiver. At first they are just unpleasant. The caregiver helps him to learn to understand them. p 163
• “If the child can trust to be able to influence the events happening to him, if he can feel that he is not a possessive receiver, but an active participant of his care, then his sense of competence will grow stronger. If he is never dealt with as if he was an object — be it either precious or worthless — but as a human being who feels, watches, remembers, and understands or will understand… ., if the words and gestures are not only nice but they also consider the sensitivity of the child continuously, then a real dialogue will form between the two partners during nursing, starting at the youngest age.” Judit Falk. p 164
• “The authentic behavior of the adult is part of the good care. What this means is that every detail of the child’s well-being, every reaction, mimic, tone, and intonation of his body, is important to her, and she is aware that what she is doing with him has an effect on not only him in the present but also his future.” Judit Falk. p 165
• “The genuinely participating infant takes part in the care with the pleasure of “I am doing it myself.” From time to time he also allows himself to concentrate on something else, to move around, or to turn the adult’s attention to something else, and the cooperating adult accepts these detours as much as possible.” Judit Falk. p 166
• The image that the young infant creates of his own body, based on the experiences of the first few months or years of his life, will deeply influence his future. His care during infancy will affect his entire life, [his] personality, his self-image, the development of his self-consciousness and his sexual well-being, and his adult behavior as a parent. His relationship to his own body and its functioning depends on the quality of the care, its being pleasant or unpleasant, and the good or bad feeling of the adult nursing him.” Judit Falk. p 167
• Favorite Article: Facilitating the Play of Children at Loczy. Anna Tardos. p 168
• Many definitions of play, here using the term to mean a chance for uninhibited free activity, in most cases using an object to play with.
• “In no way do we see our task to teach children how to play or stimulate them to play. We are learning from the children how to play, rather than the children learning from us.” Anna Tardos. p 168
• “Our basic premise in facilitating children’s play is that our help must always be indirect. We offer possibilities; the child makes the choice. For example, it is our task to provide toys, but we never put any toy into the infant’s hand.” Anna Tardos. p 168
• Favorite Article: The Pikler-Loczy Philosophy — Loczy Research and Current Popular Views. p 172
• Pikler encourages cooperation from an early age. When baby gets old enough to assert will, adults start to cooperate with baby and appreciate his developing will. 🙂 p 196
• “Go slow. And then go slower.” Magda Gerber. p 204
• “… a large part of burnout has to do with continuing to work in systems that are broken, acting in ways that are not in accordance with our inner voices, and drudging through processes that have problems and waste time.” Deborah Greenwald. p 218
• “We need to remember to trust ourselves, and to listen to our inner barometers. Do you need to make a change, speak to someone, listen to someone? Vault?” Deborah Greenwald. p 219
• Magda relished intense discussions, “Go ahead, disagree with me–I love it!” p 220
• “Are your expectations reasonable? Is your environment supporting you? What can you change to make life easier for you and the babies?” p 220
• “A still and silent child is not obedient, he is annihilated.” Maria Montessori.
• Bedtime ritual. Maybe 3 steps instead of 10. Do something that is sustainable everyday. Do we feel pumped up or drained? We can tell the difference. p 220
• Making a mistake is okay, what matters is repair. p 223

 

My Notes

“It is a learned set of responses, and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks. This means that it is environmentally, not genetically, caused. In other words, unlike most of the diagnoses it is confused with, it is neither inborn nor characterological. As such, it is learned. It is not inscribed in your DNA. It is a disorder caused by nurture [or rather the lack of it] not nature.” p. 1

Toxic shame: “explored enlightening by John Bradshaw in Healing the Shame that Binds, obliterates a Cptsd survivor’s self-esteem with an overwhelming sense that he is loathsome, ugly, stupid, or fatally flawed. Overwhelmingly self-disdain is typically a flashback to the way he felt when suffering the contempt and visual skewering of his traumatizing parent. Toxic shame can also be created by constant parental neglect and rejection.” p. 4-5

“I once heard renowned traumatologist, John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM used by all mental professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet. In other words, the role of traumatized childhoods in most adult psychological disorders is enormous.” p. 8

“I have witnessed my clients with Cptsd misdiagnosed with various anxiety and depressive disorders unfairly and inaccurately labeled with bipolar, narcissistic, codependent, autistic spectrum and borderline disorders. [This is not to say that Cptsd does not sometimes co-occur with these disorders.] (cont.)
(cont.)Further confusion also arises in the case of ADHD as well as obsessive/compulsive disorder, both of which are sometimes more accurately described as fixated flight responses to trauma. This is also true of ADD and some depressive and dissociative disorders which similarly can more accurately be described as fixated freeze responses to trauma.(cont.)
(cont.)Furthermore, this is not to say that those so misdiagnosed do not have issues that are similar and correlative with the disorders above. The key point is that these labels are incomplete and unnecessarily shaming descriptions of what the survivor is actually afflicted with.” p. 8-9

YES!!!! “Reducing Cptsd to “panic disorder” is like calling food allergies chronically itchy eyes. Over-focusing treatment on the symptoms of panic in the former case and eye health in the latter does little to get at root causes. Feelings of panic or itchiness in the eyes can be masked with medication, but all the associated problems that cause these symptoms will remain untreated.(cont.)
(cont.)Moreover, most of the diagnoses mentioned above are typically treated as innate characterological defects rather than as learned maladaptation to stress – adaptations that survivors were forced to learn as traumatized children.” p. 9 

“In this vein, I believe that many substance and process addictions also begin as misguided, maladaptations to parental abuse and abandonment. They are early adaptations that are attempts to soothe and distract from the mental, emotional, and physical pain of Cptsd.” p. 9

“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.” p. 10

“Many dysfunctional parents react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment. Contempt is extremely traumatizing to a child, and at best, extremely noxious to an adult.(cont.)
(cont.)Contempt is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of denigration, rage and disgust. Rage creates fear, and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention. Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment.(cont.)
(cont.)Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders and prison guards typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves, prisoners, and children, who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.” p. 10

“Emotional neglect also typically underlies most truamatizations that are more glaringly evident. Parents who routinely ignore or turn their backs on a child’s calls for attention, connection, or help, abandon their child to unmanageable amounts of fear, and the child eventually gives up and succumbs to depressed, death-like feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.” p. 11

“Carol’s parents started in on her early by disdainfully blaming her for soiling her diaper before she was even one. By the time she was three, she had been so frequently punished for making noise while talking and playfully exploring her house, that her constant state of fear generated an ADHD-like condition in her.” p. 14

Key Developmental Arrests in Cptsd

• Self-accepting
• Clear sense of identity
• Self-compassion
• Self-protection
• Capactiy to draw comfort from relationship
• Abiltiy to relax
• Capacity for full self-expression
• Willpower & motivation
• Peace of mind
• Self-care
• Belief that life is a gift
• Self-esteem
• Self-confidence

“My efforts to nurture myself in these arrested areas of development were limited and spoiled in early recovery by a feeling of resentment. “Why do I have to do this?” was a common internal refrain. Resentment that should have been directed toward my parents often boomeranged onto me and spoiled or thwarted my efforts at self-nurturance. Thankfully ongoing recovery work helped remedy this resentment. It taught me to practice self-care in a spirit of giving to a child who needed and really deserved to be helped.” p 22-23

“An especially tragic developmental arrest that afflicts many survivors is the loss of their willpower and self-motivation. Many dysfunctional parents react destructively to their child’s budding sense of initiative. If this occurs throughout his childhood, the survivor may feel lost and purposeless in his life. He may drift through his whole life rudderless and without a motor.” p. 23

“The ability to invoke willpower seems to be allied to your ability to healthily express your anger.” p. 24

“Like many other survivors that I have worked with, I developed the imposter’s syndrome. This syndrome contradicted the outside positive feedback that I was receiving. It insisted that if people really knew me, they would see what a loser I was.” p. 24

“The first level of recovery usually involves repairing the damage that Cptsd wreaks on our thoughts and beliefs about ourselves.” p. 24

“We need to understand exactly how appalling parenting created the now self-perpetuating trauma that we now live in. We can learn to do this in a way that takes the mountain of unfair self-blame off ourselves. We can redirect this blame to our parents’ dreadful child-rearing practices. And we can also do this in a way that motivates us to reject their influence so that we can freely orchestrate our journey of recovering.” p. 25

Ego: not a dirty word. Another word for self or identity. “The healthy ego is the user friendly manager of the psyche.” “Unfortunately, Cptsd-inducing parents thwart the growth of the ego by undermining the development of the crucial egoic processes of self-compassion and self-protection.” “They do this by shaming or intimidating you whenever you have a natural impulse to have sympathy for yourself, or stand up for yourself. The instinct to care for yourself and to protect yourself against unfairness is then forced to become dormant.” p. 26

Shaming you if you stand up for yourself
“Becoming psychoeducated about Cptsd is the first level of addressing this poisonous indoctrination of your mind against your healthy ego. When you intricately understand how antagonistic your parents were to your healthy sense of self, you become more motivated to engage in the self-help processes of rectifying their damage. The more you identify their damage the more you know what to fix.(cont.)
(cont.)This is essential because without a properly functioning ego, you have no center for making healthy choices and decisions. 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.” p. 27

Self-championing stance
“You are free now as an adult to develop peace of mind and a supportive relationship with yourself. A self-championing stance can transform your existence from struggling survival to a fulfilling sense of thriving.” p. 27

Mindfulness
In early recovery, psychoeducation typically comes from the wisdom of others who are more educated than you: therapists, writers, friends, teachers. When it reaches its most powerful level it begins to become experienced as mindfulness. p. 28

“Psychologically speaking, mindfulness is taking undistracted time to become fully aware of your thoughts and feelings so that you can have more choice in how you respond to them. Do I really agree with this thought, or have I been pressured into believing it? How do I want to respond to this feeling – distract myself from it, repress it, express it, or just feel it until it changes into something else?” p. 28

“Mindfulness is a perspective of benign curiosity about all of your inner experience. Recovery is enhanced immeasurably by developing this helpful process of introspection. As it becomes more developed, mindfulness can be used to recognize and disidentify from beliefs and viewpoints that you acquired from your traumatizing family.” p. 28-29

“I cannot overstate the importance of becoming aware of your inner self-commentary. With enough practice, mindfulness eventually awakens your fighting spirit to resist the abusive refrains from your childhood, and to replace them with thoughts that are self-supportive.” p. 29

“Unfortunately, in this culture only the “positive” polarity of any emotional expreience is approved or allowed. This can cause such an avoidance of the “negative” polarity, that at least two different painful conditions result.(cont.)
(cont.)In the first, the person injures and exhausts himself in compulsive attempts to avoid a disavosed feeling, and actually becomes more stuck in it. This is like the archetyplal clown whose frantic efforts to free himself from a piece of fly paper, leave him more immobilized and entangled.(cont.)
(cont.)In the second, repression of one end of the emotional continuum often leads to a repression of the whole continuum, and the person becomes emotionally deadened. The baby of emotional vitality is thrown out with the bathwater of some unacceptable feeling.” p. 30

“A reluctance to participate in such a fundamental realm of the human experience results in much unnecessary loss. For just as without night there is no day, without work there is no play, without hunger there is no satiation, without fear there is no courage, without tears there is no joy, and without anger, there is no real love.” p. 30-31

“Most people, who choose or are coerced into only identifying with “positive” feelings, usually wind up in an emotionally lifeless middle ground – bland, deadened, and dissociated in an unemotional “now-man’s-land.” p. 31

The repression of “negative” emotions causes unnecessary pain as well as many of the “essential aspects of the feeling nature.” “In fact, much of the plethora of loneliness, alienation, and addictive distraction that plagues modern industrial societies is a result of people being taught and forced to reject, pathologize or punish so many of their own and others’ normal feeling states.” p. 31

“Nowhere, not in the deepest recesses of the self, or in the presence of his closest friends, is the average person allowed to have and explore any number of normal emotional states. Anger, depression, envy, sadness, fear, distrust, etc. are all as normal a part of life as bread and flowers and streets. Yet, they have become ubiquitously avoided and shameful human experiences. (cont.)
(cont.)How tragic this is, for all of these emotions have enormously important and healthy functions in a wholly integrated psyche. One dimension where this is most true is in the arena of healthy self-protection. For without access to our uncomfortable or painful feelings, we are deprived of the most fundamental part of our ability to notice when something is unfair, abusive, or neglectful in our environments.” YES!!! This is the reason I am suspicious of the people who claim to only like sunny, “perfect” weather!

“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.(cont.)
(cont.)Until all of the emotions are accepted indiscriminately (and acceptance does not imply license to dump emotions irresponsibly or abusively), there can be no wholeness, no real sense of well being, and no solid sense of self esteem. 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.” p. 32

Emotional intelligence: the degree to which we accept the feelings of ourselves and others. 

“Cptsd-engendering parents often hypocritically attack their children’s emotional expression in a bi-modal way. This occurs when the child is both abused for emoting and is, at the same time, abused by her caretaker’s toxic emotional expression… One archetypal example of this is seen in the parent who hurts his child to the point of tears, and then has the nerve to say:”Stop crying or I’ll five you something to cry about.”” p. 33

“The above is of course a blatant example of the slaughtering of emotional expression. Just as common is the insidious, passive-aggressive assault on emoting which is seen in the parent who shuns her child for expressing his feelings. This is seen in the emotionally abandoning parent who sequesters the child in a timeout for crying or routinely retreats from the crying child into her room.” p. 34

“An especially nasty for of emotional abuse occurs in the traumatizing family when the child is even attacked for displays of pleasant emotion. As I write this I flashback to scenes of my mother sneering at my little sister and snarling: “What are you so happy about!”, and my father’s frequent” “What are you laughing at – wipe that smile off your face!” p. 34

 

“The rejecting responses of our parents to our emotional expression alienate us from our feelings. Emotional abuse/neglect scsra us out of our own emotions while simultaneously making us terrified of other people’s feelings. (cont.)
(cont.)John Bradshaw describes the devastation of the child’s emotional nature as “soul murder.” He explains this as involving a process where the child’s emotional expression [his first language of self-expression] is so assaulted with disgust that any emotional experience immediately devolves into toxic shame.(cont.)
(cont.)I believe that toxic shame is the affect of the inner critic, and that inner critic thought processes are the conginitions of shame – a terrible yin/yang process emanating from our original abandonment.” p. 35

“Because of the deadly one-two punch of familial and societal attacks on our emotional selves, we need to recover our innate emotional intelligence. This is also deeply important because, as Carl Jung emphasized, our emotions tell us what is really important to us. When our emotional intelligence is restricted, we often do not know what we really want, and can consequently struggle mightily with even the smallest decisions.” p. 35

“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.” p. 36

“Grieving restores our crucial, developmentally arrested capacity to verbally ventilate. Verbal ventilation is the penultimate grieving practice. It is speaking from your feelings in a way that releases and resoles your emotional distress.” p. 36

Verbal ventilation is the “key bonding process in intimacy. It is also the key healing process of effective therapy.” p. 37

Example of verbal ventilation: “A client arrives flashbacked and in pain. He verbally ventilates about it. He is the regressed hurt child, feeling bad, and part of him is sad and part of him is mad. He is once again lost in the painful feelings of his original abandonment, and this state is like a death that responds well to grieving.(cont.) 
(cont.)As he lets his feelings come into his voice, he talks, cries and angers out his pain. Through this processing of his pain, he then gradually moves out of his flashback. He is restored to his normal everyday sense that he is no longer trapped in his traumatic childhood. Relief about this returns him to his normal ability to cope. If his grieving is deep enough, he customarily feels more hopeful and lighthearted. Not infrequently, his sense of humor resurfaces, and laughter punctuates his continuing verbal ventilation. This laughter is usually much different than the sarcastic, self-bullying humor of his critic that he might have begun the session with.” p. 37

“The inner critic is sometimes so hostile to grieving that shrinking the critic may need to be your first recovery priority. Until the critic is sufficiently tamed, grieving can actually make flashbacks worse, rather than perform the restorative processes it alone can initiate.(cont.)
(cont.)I have worked with numerous clients who were so traumatized around grieving that we needed to spend many months working on the cognitive level before grieving was released from the spoiling effects of the toxic critic.” p. 37

Finding a sense of belonging: reading spiritual books, meditative practices, nature, music, the arts… p. 38-39 

Spiritual or numinous experiences can provide survivor with first sense of belonging which can lead to meeting author or speaker or fellow traveler which can open door to finding comfort in other humans, realizing that there may be safe enough humans out there to engage with. p. 40

“Good enough parents provide generous amounts of support, protection and comforting. They also guide their children to deal constructively with recurring existential difficulties such as loss, real villains, painful world events and normal disappointments with friends and family.(cont.)
(cont.)Most importantly, they model how disappointments with intimates can be repaired. A key way they do this is to easily forgive their children for normal mistakes and shortcomings.” p. 41

“In the traumatizing family however, there is little or nothing that is good enough and hence little for which to be grateful. The child instead is forced to over-develop a critic that hyper-focuses on what is dangerously imperfect in her as well as others. This sometimes helps her to hide aspects of herself that might be punished. It may further assist her to avoid people who might be punishing.(cont.)
(cont.)Unfortunately, years of this habituates the child into only seeing herself, life and others in a negative light. Consequently, when she grows up and becomes free of her truly harmful family, she cannot see that life offers her many new possibilities. Her ability to see the good in herself and certain safe enough others remains developmentally arrested.” p. 41-42

“Most of the physiological damage of extended trauma occurs because we are forced to spend so much time in hyper-arousal – stuck in fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode.” 

Most common physical reactions to Cptsd-stress:
Hypervigilance
Shallow and incomplete breathing
Constant adrenalization
Chronic muscle tightness (armoring)
Wear and tear from rushing and armoring
Inability to be fully present, relaxed and grounded in our bodies
Sleep problems from being over-activated
Digestive disorders from a tightened digestive tract
Physiological damage from excessive self-medication which alcohol, food or drugs

“Moreover, in cases of physical and sexual abuse, or capacities to be physically comforted by touch are eliminated or compromised; and, in cases of verbal and emotional abuse, our capacities to be comforted by eye- and voice-contact are undeveloped or seriously diminished.” p. 42-43

“…some somatic repair happens automatically when we reduce our physiological stress by more efficient flashback management. Particularly potent help also comes from the grieving work of reclaiming the ability to cry self-compassionately and to express anger self-protectively. Both processes can release armoring, promote embodiment, improve sleep, decrease hyperarousal and encourage deeper and more rhythmic breathing.” p. 43

About learning to stretch: “The fact that I had to weather many toxic shame attacks because I was always the least flexible person in the group did not help matters. Moreover, when various people commented about how good it felt to stretch, I felt both puzzled and further shamed, because it was anything but pleasant for me.” p. 44

Be wary of somatic processes that claim to work without addressing cognitive and emotional levels. “Some approaches also believe that their techniques eliminate the fundamental necessity of grieving the losses of childhood, and understanding how abusive and negligent parenting is at the root of our problems.” Some practices can ease physiological traumas locked in our bodies however as long as practitioner is not dismissing cognitive/emotional work. “In this vein, it is my opinion that techniques like EMDR and Somatic Experiencing are very powerful tools for stress-reduction. They are especially helpful in resolving simple ptsd. However, they are not complete Cptsd therapies, unless the practitioner is eclectic enough to be incorporating inner critic and grieving-the-losses-of-childhood work.” p. 45

SSRIs can help lower volume of inner critic to make it easier to work with but will come back if you stop unless you do work to shrink the inner critic. At right dosage, don’t seem to blunt affects enough to prevent grieving work. p. 46

John Bradshaw – almost everyone who grows up in a dysfunctional home has an eating disorder. p. 47

Origin of social anxiety: “A child who grows up with no reliable human source of love, support and protection typically falls into a great deal of social unease. He “naturally” becomes reluctant to seek support from anyone, and he is forced to adopt self-sufficiency as a survival strategy.(cont.)
(cont.)Needing anything from others can feel especially dangerous. The survivor’s innate capacity to experience comfort and support in relationship becomes very limited or non-existent. This is despite the fact that many high functioning survivors learn to socially function quite adequately.(cont.)
(cont.)This is particularly the case in structured situations where expectations are clear and common goals take the focus off conversing and pit it on task accomplishments. Unstructured social situations however, like attending parties or just hanging out can be considerably more triggering. Spontaneous self-expression feels like the same setup for disaster that it was in childhood.(cont.)
(cont.)Either way, structured or spontaneous, relating often involves hiding a great deal of anxiety and discomfort….” p. 50-51

“A central aspect of the truly helpful relational work was what John Bradshaw called “healing the shame that binds.” I believe toxic shame cannot be healed without some relational help. Several therapists and groups aided me greatly to unbind from the shame that made me hide whenever I could not invoke my perfect persona. Concurrently, I learned that real intimacy correlated with the amount I shared my vulnerabilities. As I increasingly practiced emotional authenticity, the glacier of my lifelong loneliness began to melt.” p. 53

“Therapeutic relations experiences enhanced my self-compassion considerably further than what I was able to accomplish on my own. Moreover, I believe that insufficient self-compassion is the worst developmental arrest of all, and restored self-compassion is the keystone of all effective recovery.” p. 53 

“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.” p. 54

“I have worked with many clients who began therapy with me while they were still over-controlled by their traumatizing parents – both externally, as well as internally…Through in depth exploration of their childhood trauma, many of my still-trapped clients achieved psychological freedom from their parents for the first time in their lives. Once again, this was a freedom that they had not actually achieved even though they had been living on their own for decades… These clients gradually learned to live more successfully on their own without their parents over-controlling spoiling influence. Their ability to build self-nurturing relationships with themselves almost always correlated with a major reduction or complete severing of their relationships with their parents.” p. 55

To recover the ability to be yourself in relationship, must recognize it’s unreasonable to expect others to accept you if you’re being abusively angry or contemptuous. Some trauma survivors flashback into this behavior. See ch 10 to address this. 

Recommended Books: Beyond the Marriage Fantasy, by Dan Beaver 

Reparenting is necessary. Self-mothering provides self-compassion, self-fathering provides self-protection.

“Self-mothering is based on the precept that unconditional love is every child’s birthright. Recovering from the loss of unconditional love is problematic Not getting enough of it as children was the greatest loss we had. Sadly, this loss can never be completely remediated, because unconditional love is only appropriate and developmentally helpful during the first two years or so of life.” p. 58

“The toddler who receives good enough parenting learns relatively easily to survive the very gradually diminishing supply of unconditional love. During the time she learns little by little that other people also have rights and needs. Her absolute entitlement to gratification is coming to an end, and the needs of her parents will not always be forfeited to accommodate her.(cont.)
(cont.)Once again, psychological health is based on having about two years of this no questions asked entitlement to unconditional love. It is the normal healthy narcissism that Freud described as “His Majesty the Baby.”(cont.)
(cont.)Serious problems accrue however when the toddler does not begin to learn that there are limits to his original entitlement. If there are no limits for too long, then the journey toward adult narcissism begins. On the other hand, if there are too many limits too soon, the matrix of trauma beings to form.(cont.)(cont.)Enlightened parents introduce limits slowly but surely. The do it as sucha a rate that by the time the child reaches adolescence he can balance satisfying his needs with helping his intimates to satisfy theirs. He learns to be sharing and reciprocal, a developmental task this is essential to keeping intimacy alive in his life.” p. 58-59

“Some parents can shower love on babies. But as soon as the child begins toddling around and expressing a will of her own, they become severely punishing and rejecting.” p. 59

Necessary to accept that we will never be totally flashback free. p. 68-69

Grieving work culminates in “learning to compassionately support ourselves through our experiences of depression.” p. 69

Many survivors need outside help in deconstructing the many layers of defenses. p. 69

Progress in recovery can be limited by trying to do too much at once or “bite of more than you can chew.” If you find yourself spinning your wheels or not knowing what to focus on or fix, try to simplify and focus on “shrinking the critic,” making that your go to response. p. 70

As the inner critic shrinks, the desire to care for yourself and help yourself will become more spontaneous. “This is especially true when we mindfully do things for ourselves in a spirit of loving-kindness. As such, we can do it for the child we were – the child who was deprived through no fault of her own. And, we can do it because we believe every child, without exception, deserves loving care.” p. 71

“…if the reader is like I was in the past and has no overall perspective on his suffering, he may feel like he is spinning his wheels on one icy patch of road after another. I had decades of trying everything under the sun with what felt like a deepening sense of futility and defectiveness. Gratefully, I eventually reached an invisible critical mass, and realized I had actually come a long way. I had acquired quite a few pieces in this puzzle of recovery, and only needed to organize them into a map to move along further.” p. 71

“In survival mode, even the most trivial and normally easy task can feel excruciatingly difficult. As in childhood, it is all feels just too hard. And if the flashback is especially intense, Thanatos may start knocking down the door.” Thanatos is the death urge. p. 72

“I believe regressions are sometimes a call from our psyche to address important developmental arrests. In this case, it is the need to learn unrelenting self-acceptance during a period of extended difficulty. It is also the need to develop a staunch and unyielding sense of self-protection.” p. 73

“Temptations can be great at such times to revert to the less functional ways of self-soothing that we learned when we were younger. Depending on your 4F type this commonly manifests as increased eating, substance abuse, working, sleeping and/or sexually acting out.(cont.)
(cont.)Sometimes we are triggered into self-medicating in this way because we are desperately trying to keep ourselves on the thriving end of the continuum. Desperately clinging to thriving is a hard impulse to resist, even when we are in reality way past its expiration date.(cont.)
(cont.)Yet as recovery and mindfulness increase we begin to notice that this type of self-medicating indicates that we are in a survival-flashback. We are no longer authentically on the thriving end of the continuum. We have compounded our regression, by regressing further – by self-medicating to unnaturally prolong a preferred experience. At such times, we benefit most by invoking our intention to practice self-acceptance – by recommitting to being there for ourselves no matter where we are on the continuum.” p. 73

It can be hard to accept that recovery is never complete. If we do not accept this falseness of the ‘salvation fantasy,’ we become more susceptible to blaming ourselves when we inevitably regress in the process of recovery. “Moreover, most recoverees often have the unfortunate subjective experience that the temporary regression feels as permanent as concrete. This is especially true because of the interminability feeling of flashbacks. When we flashback, we regress to our child-mind which was incapable of imagining a future any different than the everlasting present of being so abandoned.” p. 76

Pain of being invisible

“Healing from childhood trauma is also a long gradual process because recovering your full self-expression requires a great deal of practice. Being yourself can be intimidating and flashback-inducing. Healthy self-assertion was punished like a capital crime in many dysfunctional families. Expressing yourself in ways that your parents forbade typically triggers intense flashbacks at first. This can cause you to lose sight of how this practice gradually reduces the chronic pain of remaining invisible.” p. 77

“We can further bolster ourselves for such necessary flashbacks by comparing “speaking up” to going to the dentist for a toothache. Unless we accept the acute pain of the dentist’s therapeutic procedure, we will suffer chronic dental discomfit indefinitely. Unless we speak up, the loneliness of our silence will imprison us forever.” p. 77-78

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway
“Recovering from overwhelmingly painful childhoods is also so difficult because we understandably want to avoid any further pain at all. We may even believe that we need to risk a flashback and practice speaking up. But at the moment of facing the triggering that silence can so easily avoid, we cannot somoetimes help giving up and remaining mute.(cont.)
(cont.)However, if we are ever to recover our real voice, we must sometimes invoke the energy of bravery. Bravery is, in my opinion, defined by fear. It is taking right action despite being afraid. It is not brave to do things that are not scary.” Helps to work with anger. p. 78

“With enough practice, therapeutic flashbacks not only diminish, but begin to be replaced by a healthy sense of pride in ourselves for our courageous self-championing. More and more we are rewarded with feelings of safe belonging in the world.” p. 78

“It is crucial for deeper level recovery that we learn that feelings of fear, shame and guilt are sometimes signs that we have said or done the right thing. They are emotional flashbacks to how we were traumatized for trying to claim normal human privileges.(cont.)
(cont.)As our recovery progresses, we need to learn to endure these feelings. Reinterpreting the deeper meaning of these feelings is key to accomplishing this. Typically this involves epiphanies like the following. “I feel afraid now, but I am not in danger like I was as a child.” “I feel guilty not because I am guilty, but because I was intimidated into feeling guilty for expressing my opinions, my needs and my preferences.” “I feel shame because my parents rained disgust on me for being me. I say no to these toxic parental curses, and I am proud and right to see how they tried to murder my soul I five them their shame back as disgust – the disgust any healthy adult feels when he sees a parent bullying a child with contempt, or when he sees a parent heartlessly ignoring a suffering child.” p. 78

Optimal stress, necessary for growth
“I believe that optimal stress is frequently attained when we practice the behavious that remedy our developmental arrests. Examples of this include reading self-help books, attending self-improvement workshops, working at deeper self-discovery through journaling, or struggling to be more vulnerable and authentic in a therapy session or an evolving relationship. Moreover, it might be that minor flashbacks sometimes function as optimal stress.” p. 79-80

“We live in an emotionally impoverished culture, and those who stick with a long term recovery process are often rewarded with emotional intelligence far beyond the norm. This is somewhat paradoxical, as survivors of childhood trauma are initially injured more grievously in their emotional natures than those in the general population.” p. 80

“Perhaps the greatest reward of improved emotional intelligence is seen in a greater capacity for deeper intimacy. Emotional intelligence is a foundational ingredient of relational intelligence – a type of intelligence that is also frequently diminished in the general populace.” p. 80

“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 upbringing.” 81

“The survivor who follows the introspective “road less travelled” becomes increasingly free of compulsive and unconscious allegiance to unhelpful familital, religious and societal values that were instilled at an impressionable age.(cont.)
(cont.)The recoveree now gets to choose her own values and reject those that are not in her own best interest. She develops a deeper more grounded self-respect that is not contingent upon going with the herd and shifting center with every new popular trend. In psychological parlance, she becomes free and brave enough to individuate and develop more of her full potential.” 81

“In Joseph Campbell’s worlds, the survivor learns to “follow his own bliss.” 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 even extend this freedom into his home decor. In this vein, I have seen many survivors discover their own aesthetic, as well as an increased appreciation of beauty in general. How this contrasts with many of the homes of my “normal” sports-buddies, whose homes are often sparsely decorated, as if they are too afraid to put something out or up lest it not be cool enough.” p. 81

“As the survivor recovers the right of free choice, she becomes more open to trying new things – healthy things that mainstream society might consider uncool or even taboo. Here are some examples of this that I believe are conducive to both recovery and healthy everyday living: voluntary simplicity, improved diet, meditation, alternative medicine, broad scale compassion, environmentalism, deeper emotional communication and a broader use of the grieving process.” p. 81-82

“The survivor who pursues long-term development on his journey of recovering generally achieves greater overall evolution than the average citizen. For many untraumatized people, the pursuit of ongoing learning often stops after their last formal learning experience – whether that is high school or college.(cont.)
(cont.)Introspective development also rewards the recoveree with more perspective and wisdom in making important life choices. It also improves his everyday instinctual choices, such as whether to fight, flee, freeze or fawn in times of real danger.” p. 82

Often many layers of minimization. The critic can be so strong it seems to be the entire identity. p. 92

Substance and process disorders can be seen as misguided ways to avoid pain and the desire to reduce these habits can be used as reason to learn other self-soothing tools. Learning to grieve offers many tools for working through emotional pain. After grieving and working through the pain, we require less need to harmfully avoid the pain. p. 95

We evolved to be near our caregivers. For 98% of human history we were in the Hunter-Gatherer era which required being near caregivers for safety. Fear of separation from caregivers is hardwired into the child as a healthy response to the separation. Fear is also linked to the fight response so that an infant separated would automatically cry angrily for attention, help, and cessation of abandonment. However, families that engender Cptsd, loathe angry crying. Many will even find professionals who will support them in routinely leaving young children alone to “cry it out.” 🙁 p. 96

Emotional neglect causes a child to abandon himself and to give up on the formation of a self in order to preserve the illusion of a connection to the parent and protect them from losing whatever connection they have. This requires self-abdication (forfeiture of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-care, self-interest, and self-protection). Recourse becomes to be hypervigilant about things that can go wrong… child’s consciousness becomes overwhelmed with processes of drasticizing and catastrophizing which lead the child to constantly prepare himself for the worst. “This is the process by which Cptsd with its overdeveloped stress and toxic shame programs sets in and becomes triggerable by a plethora of normally innocuous stimuli.” Most notable of stimuli are other people, especially one reminiscent of the parents.This “people-are-dangerous process” can become the social anxiety which is a common symptom of Cptsd. p. 98

“Emotional intelligence and its cohort, relational intelligence, are forced into developmental arrest by abandoning parents. Children never learn that a relationship with a healthy person can be comforting and enriching. The ability to open to and benefit from love and caring from others often lays dormant and undeveloped. (cont.)
(cont.)Moreover, the appropriate management of the normal emotions that recurrently arise in significant relationships is never modeled for them. Emotional intelligence about the healthy and functional aspects of anger, sadness, and fear lies fallow.” p. 99

Emotional abandonment is healed by real intimacy. Real intimacy requires showing up in times of vulnerability, “Deep-level recovering occurs when we successfully connect with a safe enough other during the flashbacked-times of feeling trapped in the fear, shame, and depression of the abandonment melange.” Requires practicing vulnerability (“showing up in pain”). Tend to return to default positions of hiding or camouflaging with substances. “Yet I drew strength from a growing distaste for the social perfectionism of my people-pleasing codependence. I somehow knew my loneliness would never decrease unless I took the risk to see if certain well chosen others would accept me in all aspects of my experience, not just the shiny ones…even after considerable de-minimization of my childhood abuse/neglect picture, I was still convinced that everyone by my therapist would find me abhorrent if I shared about my flashback feelings. Furthermore, my trust of my therapist also wavered quite a bit at first, especially during my deepest flashbacks.” p. 100-101

Life Narrative
There is “growing evidence that recovery from Complex PTSD is reflected in the narrative a person tells about her life. The degree of recovery matches the degree to which a survivor’s story is complete, coherent, and emotionally congruent and told from a self-sympathetic perspective.” “In my experience, deep level recovery is often reflected in a narrative that highlights the role of emotional neglect in describing what one has suffered and what one continues to deal with.” p. 102

Story of Matt searching for mother’s day card and resulting flashback. He had “achieved a great deal of de-minimization since the previous mother’s day when he thought his mother was a good mother because she had never hit him. Now, however, he was heavily triggered by spending an hour in a card shop unable to find a card that he could send to his mother. As we explored this further, we discovered that the sentiments written in every card made him feel like he would be betraying his inner child if he sent it.” Not one of the cards expressed something he was grateful for. “I don’t have one memory of anything nice she ever said or did for me!” He then cried and got angry over “the scornful look and the sarcastic tone of voice that characterized his interactions with her.” After enough healthy grieving, his flashback began to resolve and sense of humor returned. Joked about starting a greeting card business for people like him with cards that said… “Thanks Mom for never knowing what grade I was in” or “Thanks Mom for all the memories of you walking away whenever I was hurting” or “Thanks Mom for teaching me how to only notice what was wrong with me” or “Thanks Mom for teaching me how to frown at myself in self-disgust.” p. 103

“Understanding how profoundly derelict your parents were in their duty to nurture and protect you is a master key to your recovery. You will benefit greatly fro seeing emotional flashbacks as direct messages from your child-self about how much your parents rejected you. When denial is significantly deconstructed, you will typically feel genuine compassion for the child that you were. This self-compassion assuages emotional neglect by providing you with the missed childhood experience of receiving empathy in painful emotional states instead of contempt or abandonment. This, then, helps you to reverse the childhood-survival habit of automatic self-abandonment. In turn, this can further motivate you to identify and address the many ways you were abused and/or neglected.” p. 104

“…it is an empowering accomplishment to really get the profound significance of childhood emotional neglect. IT is often flashback-resolving to realize in the moment that a flashback into bewilderment and hopelessness is an emotional reliving of your childhood trauma. Like nothing else, this can generate a self-protective impulse toward your child-self and your present-time self, kick-starting the process of resolving any given flashback.” p. 104

Fight-Fawn
Charming bully. Combines opposites of narcissism and codependency. Can frequently and dramatically vascillate between fight and fawn. “When a fight-fawn is upset with someone, she can fluctuate over and over between attacking diatribes and fervent declarations of caring in a single interaction. More vitriol and entitlement in vacillations that reverse fawn-fight type. “…his ‘caretaking’ often feels coercive and manipulative. It is frequently aimed at achieving personal agendas which range from blatant to covert. Moreover, the fight-fawn rarely takes any real responsibility for contributing to an interpersonal problem. He typically ends up in the classic fight position of projecting imperfection onto the other.” Tends to have high entitlement and often devoid of real empathy or compassion. p. 124

Origins of codependency (fawn response) – fight doesn’t work
“As a toddler, the codependent (fawn response) learns quickly that protesting abuse leads to even more frightening parental retaliation. Thus she responds by relinquishing her fight response, deleting “no” from her vocabulary and never developing the language skills of healthy assertiveness…moreover, many abusive parents reserve their most harsh punishments for “talking back”, and hence ruthlessly extinguish the ifht response in their children. Unfortunately, this typically happens at such an early age that they later have little or no memory of it.” p. 130-131

And – flight doesn’t work
Future codependent danger is intensified if she tries to run away. An adaptation to the flight response: “Many toddlers, at some point, translate the flight urge into the running around in circles of hyperactivity. This adaptation “works” on some level to help them escape from the uncontainable feelings of the abandonment melange. Many of these unfortunates later symbolically run away from their pain. They deteriorate into the obsessive-compulsive adaptations of workaholism, busyholism, spend-aholism, and sex and love addiction that are common in flight types.” p. 131

And – freeze doesn’t work
The toddler who bypasses the adaptation develops the freeze response by becoming the “lost child.”

Slips into dissociation…”learns to let his parents’ verbal abuse go in one ear and out the other.” Not uncommon for this to become use of numbing substance addictions: pot, alcohol, opiates, etc. p. 131

“The future codependent toddler, however, wisely gives up on the fight, flight, and freeze responses. Instead she learns to fawn her way into the occasional safety of being perceived as helpful. It bears repeating that the fawn type is often one of the gifted children that Alice Miller writes about in The Drama of the Gifted Child. She is the precocious one who discovers that a modicum of safety can be purchased by becoming variously useful to her parent.(cont.)
(cont.)Servitude, ingratiation, and obsequiousness become important survival strategies. She cleverly forfeits all needs that might inconvenience her parents. She stops having preferences and opinions that might anger them. Boundaries of every kind are surrendered to mollify her parents, who repudiate their duty of caring for her. As we saw in the last chapter, she is often parentified and becomes as thoroughly helpful to the parent as she can….(cont.)
(cont.)All this loss of self begins before the child has many words, and certainly no insight. For the budding codependent, all hints of danger soon immediately trigger servile behaviors and abdication of rights and needs.(cont.)
(cont.)These response patterns are so deeply set in the psyche, that as adults, many codependents automatically respond to threat like dogs, symbolically rolling over on their backs, wagging their tails, hoping for a little mercy and an occasional scrap.” p. 132

Extreme emotional abandonment can also cause codependency. A severely neglected child can experience extreme lack of connection as traumatic and may respond by developing the fawn response. If a child experiences that being useful and not requiring anything herself gets her some positive attention codependency can begin to grow. p. 132-133

Trauma-induced codependency is “syndrome of self-abandonment and self-abnegation. Codependency is a fear-based inability to express rights, needs and boundaries in a relationship. It is a disorder of assertiveness, characterized by a dormant fight response and a susceptibility to being exploited, abused, and/or neglected.” p. 133

“In conversations, codependents seek safety and acceptance in relationship through listening and eliciting. They invite the other to talk rather than risk exposing their thoughts, views, and feelings. They ask questions to keep the attention off themselves, because their parents taught them that talking was dangerous and that their words were indictments that would inevitably prove them guilty of being unworthy.” p. 133 

Important to allow others to be imperfect. “We all have minor limitations and foibles that may not be transformable. Loved ones need to be spared from being pressured to fix what is unfixable. My way of approaching this is to always frame my advice as take-it or leave-it. To prove this is so, I refrain from then going on about it repetitively. Additionally, I typically check in first to see if the other person actually wants some feedback.” p. 137

Fawn-fight types can be aggressive in attempts to help others. “Typically they equate helping with changing, and can alienate others by persistently pressuring them to take their advice.” p. 137

“The fawn-fight type is the smother-love caretaker. Her caretaking approach of being over-focused on the other is sometimes a repetition of her childhood servant role. Moreover, her helpfulness is usually less self-serving than the fight-fawn…Nonetheless, the zealousness of her caretaking sometimes makes the recipient believe it when she says, “I love you to death.(cont.)
(cont.)In flashback, the fawn-fight can deteriorate into manipulative or even coercive care-taking. He can smother love the other into conforming to his view of who she should be.(cont.)
(cont.)Fawn-fight types may periodically reach a critical mass of frustration that erupts when the “patient” refuses his advice or balks at his unwanted caretaking. Somethise the fawn-fight feels an entitlement to punish the other “for their own good”, especially in a primary relationship.” Sometimes misdiagnosed as borderline (can be emotionally intense during flashbacks). p. 137

He had the realization: “No wonder I wind up with one narcissist after another. Narcissists love me because I am so enabling of their monologuing. I probably met lots of nice balanced people who did not want another date with me because it seemed like I was hiding and hard to get to know.” He had a friend who joked that “her listening and eliciting defenses were so perfected that she could turn anyone, even a blank-screen therapist, into a monologuing narcissist. “To break free of their codependence, survivors must learn to stay present to the fear that triggers the self-abdication of the fawn response. In the face of their fear, they must try on and practice an expanding repertoire of more functional responses to fear.” p. 139

“As later stage recovery progresses, the survivor increasingly “knows her own mind.” She slowly dissolves the habit of reflexively agreeing with other people’s preferences and opinions. She more easily expresses her own point of view and makes her own choices. And most importantly, she learns to stay inside of herself.” p. 141

“Many fawns survived by constantly focusing their awareness on their parents to figure out what was needed to appease them. Some become 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.” But now it is needed to work on staying inside their own experience “without constantly projecting their attention outward to please others. Fawn-types who are still habituated to people-pleasing, must work on reducing their ingratiating behaviors. I have noticed over the years that the degree to which a survivor strains to please me reflects the degree to which his parents were dangerous.” p. 141

Emotional individuation work-setting boundaries that let us stay true to our own emotional experience.
Work on being mindful of mirroring and matching behaviors. A “great accomplishment to significantly reduce verbal matching. It is an even more powerful achievement to reduce inauthentic emotional mirroring….dysfunctional emotional matching is seen in behaviors such as acting amused at destructive sarcasm, acting loving when someone is punishing, and acting forgiving when someone is repetitively harmful.” p. 141

One of the most important things he ever learned: how to be okay with disapproval. With good, generally approving friends, some feedback from them is easier to take. And some disapproval can actually be a good thing: lets you know you are moving in the right direction/doing the right thing for you. “Nowhere is this more truer than with the disapproval of the narcissistic parents or partners of clients whom I am working to rescue from their enslavement.” p. 143

Emotional flashbacks
Regressions to overwhelming feeling-states of your childhood abandonment. Dominated by fear, shame and/or depression. Common experiences include: feeling small, fragile, helpless, things are too hard, too scary, being seen feels excruciating and vulnerable, battery feels dead, like “an apocalypse feels like it will imminently be upon you.” Overwhelming and confusing because rarely any visual components. These “occur in the brains of people who have been triggered into a 4F reaction so often, that minor events can now trigger them into a panicky state.” p. 145

Learn to identify things that trigger flashbacks: “unsafe people, places, activities, and triggering mental processes.” Recognizing is crucial in order to avoid. p. 148-9

Triggers can be small. Common triggers include: “someone looking at us,…making a mistake, asking for help, having to speak in front of a group of people.” Sometimes even “feeling tired, sick, lonely, or hungry…any type of physical pain…” p. 149

Learning to fear “the look” is conditioning. “With enough pairings of the look with physical punishment or extreme abandonment, the parent can eventually delete the smack and get the same results with just the look. With enough repetitions in early childhood, this pairing can last a lifetime, so that the parent can control the child forever with the look.” p. 151

There are both internal and external triggers. Internal are more common and often caused by the inner critic. “Typically they are thoughts and visualizations about endangerment or the need for perfection. The survivor may, seemingly without reason, visualize someone being abusive. Moreover he can also, seemingly out of the blue, worry himself into a flashback by simply thinking he is not perfectly executing a task that he is undertaking. He can also frighten himself by enumerating the many ways that he might mess up any upcoming task.” p. 152

“…resolving a flashback requires rebalancing significant biochemical changes in the brain and body that take time to subside. For example, over-adrenalization sometimes dramatically morphs into the hangover of adrenalin exhaustion, before the adrenal function can be rebalanced. Decreasing the intensity of a flashback with quick remedial action decreases the time it takes for our physiology to recover.” p. 153

Signs of being in a flashback (p. 154-155):

feeling small, hopeless or helpless

increase in inner/outer critic (feeling judgemental)

emotional reactions out of proportion

increase in primal soothing: food, distracting activities, mood-altering substances

In flashback we lose access to “post-childhood knowledge.” p. 156

Perspective-substitution: broadens viewpoint to include more than inner critic and “helps us to dethrone the critic from its life-negating point of view…one who dwells so much on what is wrong that he cannot see anything that is right.” p. 185

A practice to counter the inner critic and practice perspective correction: before falling asleep at night, list at least 10 positive experiences that happened that day. Generally will be simple and basic things. Doing this overtime will help balance the negative critic inherited from parents. p. 188

With progress in recovery, there develops the ability to notice the critic before entering full flashback which allows for better protective actions. Flashbacks can also serve as “evidence/proof” of childhood traumatization. “Flashbacks point irrefutably to the fact that your parent’s abandonment forced you to habituate to hypervigilance and negative noticing.” p. 189

Inner and outer critic are usually both silent and internal (except for fight type). “When we regress to the outer critic, we obsess about the unworthiness and treacherousness of others. Unconsciously, we do this to avoid emotional investment in relationships.(cont.)
(cont.)The outer critic developed in reaction to parents who were too dangerous to trust. The outer critic helped us to be hyperaware of the subtlest signal that our parents were deteriorating into their most dangerous behaviors. Over time the outer critic grew to believe that anyone and everyone would inevitably turn out to be as untrustworthy as our parents.” p. 192

Freeze type can judgmentally denounce entire world. 

Flight type can use his “perfectionistic striving to excel so his outer critic can judge everyone else as inferior.

Fawn type uses “self-hate to self-censor and avoid the fear of being authentic and vulnerable in relationship.”

Fight type uses outer critic to control others while paradoxically using prickliness to keep them from getting to close. Can also leave at first sign others can’t be controlled. p. 193

“Children are initially wired to respond angrily to parental abuse or neglect. Outside of the fight types, most traumatized children learn early that protesting parental unfairness is an unpardonable offense. They are generally forced to repress their protests and complaints. This then renders their anger silent and subliminal. This agner however, does not disappear. It percolates as an ever accumulating sea of resentment that can fuel the other critic’s obsession for finding fault and seeing danger in everyone.(cont.)
(cont.)Viewing all relationships through the lens of parental abandonment, the outer critic never lets down its guard. It continuously transfers unexpressed childhood anger onto others, and silently scapegoats them by blowing current disappointments out of proportion. Citing insignificant transgressions as justification, the survivor flashes back into outer critic mode, and silently fumes and grumbles in long judgemental ruminations.” p. 194

Passive aggressive behaviors: (p. 194) 
“distancing yourself in hurt withdrawal” 
“pushing others away with backhanded compliments”
poor listening
hurtful teasing disguised as joking
withholding positive feedback and appreciation
chronic lateness
poor follow through on commitments

Media tends to normalize outer critic. Common behaviors portrayed: (p. 197)
judgmentalness
sarcasm
negativity
fear-mongering
scapegoating

Watching news can serve as trigger. p. 199

Cptsd is from an attachment disorder where child never learns that other people can soothe emotional pain. “She never learns that real intimacy grows out of sharing all of her experience.” “To the degree that our caretakers attack or abandon us for showing vulnerability, to that degree do we later avoid the authentic self-expression that is fundamental to intimacy….subliminal memories of being scorned for seeking our parents’ support then short-circuit our inclinations to share our troubles and ask for help.” “Even worse, retaliation fantasies can plague us for hours and days on the occasions when we do show our vulnerabilities. I once experienced this after being very honest and vulnerable in a job interview with a committee of eight. Over the next three insomnia-plagued nights, my outer critic ran non-stop films featuring my interviewers’ contempt about everything I had said, and disgust about all that I had left out. Even after they subsequently and enthusiastically hired me, the outer critic plagued me with “imposter syndrome” fantasies of eventually being exposed as incompetent in the new job.” p. 200

“Our dysfunctional parents typically kill our protest function before our memory function comes on line. Nonetheless, fear of parental reprisal is often the unconscious dynamic that scares us out of challenging our own toxic thinking.” p. 208

“Our recovery depends on us using mindfulness to decrease out habits of dissociation. Only then can we see the critic programs that we need to deconstruct, shrink and consciously disidentify from. This typically involves learning to tolerate the pain that comes from discovering how pervasive and strong the critic is.” p. 208

“A key characteristic of outer critic-dominated flashbacks is that we displace emotional pain from past relationships onto current ones. Transference is the pipeline from the past that supplies the critic with anger to control, attack or disapprove of present relationships.” p. 210

“The most common transferrential dynamic that I witness occurs when leftover hurt about a parent gets displaced onto someone we perceive as hurting us in the present. When this occurs, we respond to them with a magnified anger or anguish that is out of proportion to what they did.(cont.)
(cont.)Transference can also grossly distort our perceptions, and sometimes we can misperceive a harmless person as being hurtful. Transference can fire up the critic to imaging slights that do not actually occur. Transference typically runs wild when the outer critic is on a rampage.” p. 210

“A person who was “repeatedly pathologized and punished for emoting in childhood may experience grieving as exacerbating their flashbacks rather than relieving them.” p. 220

“Angering can also immediately trigger the survivor into toxic shame. This is often true of instances when there is only an angry thought or fantasy. Dysfunctional parents typically reserve their worst punishments for their child’s anger. This then traps the child’s anger inside.” p. 220

“Critic management is often the primary work of early stage grief work. This work involves recognizing and challenging the ways the critic is blocking or shaming the processes or grieving. As disidentification from the critic increases, grieving can then best be initiated with low intensity verbal ventilation. Over time verbal ventilation can be allowed to gradually increase in sad and angry intonation.” p. 220

“It appears children are hard-wired to release fear through angering and crying.”… “In the dysfunctional family however, the traumatizing parent soon eradicates the child’s capacity to emote. The child becomes afraid and ashamed of her own tears and anger. Tears get shut off and anger gets trapped inside and is eventually turned against the self as self-attack, self-hate, self-disgust, and self-rejection. Self-hate is the most grievous reenactment of parental abandonment.” p. 221

Anger and crying. Need to happen “in concert.” Dysfunctional whining is where either the anger or sadness is repressed but leaks through anyway and in a irritating way. “When a hurt person only knows how to express anger, his repressed sadness unconsciously seeps into his anger in a way that makes him sound like a martyr or someone with delusions of persecution.” Because sadness is not released, there is no relief and can exhaust listener’s empathy. “…when a hurt person is only able to cry, repressed anger tinges her sadness and makes it sound like irritable and interminable bellyaching… ‘anger coming through a very small hole.’”p. 227-228 

Flashbacks are visible in MRI with over-active right-brain (emotional side) and under-active left-brain (thinking). Verbal ventilation can help fix this imbalance by stimulating left-brain. Also thought that this is one reason its so hard to realize you’re in a flashback (because of loss of left-brain function). p. 231

Verbal ventilation is only helpful when freed from control of inner critic. Can easily shift to self-flagellation, especially early in recovery. This will only serve to trigger or intensify flashback(s). p. 232

Verbal ventilation helps us reconnect with and communicate about unmet childhood needs . p. 232

Disassociation is a defense children develop to protect from overwhelming pain. Two types: right-brain and left-brain. Right-brain: classical, common to freeze type, numbing out against intense feeling or strong inner critic. Fantasy, fogginess, tv watching, tiredness, sleep. Left-brain is obsessiveness: catastrophizing, list of worries, trivialization, obsession with sports, celebrities, intellectualization. p. 234-235

“When we share what is emotionally important to us, we learn to connect with others in a meaningful and healing way. This applies to sharing concerns that excite and please us, as well as those that frighten or depress us. Perhaps there was no more detrimental consequence of our childhood abandonment than being forced to habitually hide our authentic selves. Many of us come out of childhood believing that what we have to say is as uninteresting to others as it was to our parents.(cont.)
(cont.)We must repudiate this damaging legacy of the past. Verbal ventilation is the key way that people make friends. It parallels the way tender touch, soothing voice, and welcoming facial expressions help 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.(cont.)
(cont.)Committing to this type of practice typically requires courage and perseverance. Authentic sharing can be triggering, and sometimes flashes the survivor back to being punished or rejected for being vulnerable. Therapy, individual or group, can help greatly to overcome and work through these obstacles to vitalizing your self-expression.” p. 236

“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.(cont.) 
(cont.)Nowhere is this truer than with mutual commiseration. Mutual commiseration is the process in which two intimimats are reciprocally sympathetic to each other’s troubles and difficulties. It is the deepest most intimate channel to intimacy – profounder than sex. Mutual commiseration also typically promotes a spontaneous opening into many levels of light-hearted and spontaneous connecting.” p. 236 

Feeling. Is kinesthetic, not cognitive. Shifting focus of awareness from thoughts to feelings, emotions, energetic states and body sensations. p. 237

“Physical sensations in the body often co-occur with feelings. Moreover, sensations of tightness and tension can develop as a defense against feelings. As unexpressed feelings accumulate, a greater degree of muscular tension is necessary to keep them under wraps.” p. 238

“Holding your breath is a further manifestation of armoring. It is an especially common way of keeping feelings at bay, as breathing naturally brings your awareness down to the level of feeling.” p. 239

“We are typically in advanced recovery when we can both emote out and feel through our anger, sadness, fear, shame and depression. 

An exercise to help feel pain and grieve. Practice it even if it feels silly or inauthentic. Eventually you will feel a genuine experience of compassion. When you do, you’ll know your recovery has reached a deep level. (cont.)
(cont.)Go back in time and visualize yourself as a child. Imagine holding yourself as a child on your lap and comforting her/him and say, “I feel such sorrow that you were so abandoned and that you felt so alone so much of the time. I love you even more when you are stuck in this abandonment pain – especially because you had to endure it for so long with no one to comfort you. That shouldn’t have happened to you. It shouldn’t happen to any child. Let me comfort and hold you. You don’t have to rush to get over it. It is not your fault. You didn’t cause it and you’re not to blame. You don’t have to do anything. Just let me hold you. Take your time. I love you always and care about you no matter what.” p. 240

Staying present to feelings of abandonment depression is deepest level work. “When we are able to do this, our recovering has reached a profound level.” p. 249

“Chronic emotional abandonment devastates a child. It naturally makes her feel and appear deadened and depressed. Functional parents respond to a child’s depression with concern and comfort. Abandoning parents respond to the child with anger, disgust, and/or further abandonment…” p. 249

Depression is taboo in our culture. But often has helpful and important information contained in it. “Healing progresses when we learn to distinguish depressed thinking [which we need to eliminate] from depressed feeling [which we sometimes need to feel].” Occasional feelings of depression are part of the “price of admission to life.” “Depression is sometimes an invaluable herald of the need to slow down for rest and restoration. When depression is most helpful, it gives us access to a unique spring of intuition, such as that which informs us that a once valued job or relationship is no longer healthy for us. In such instances we feel depressed because some irreparable change has rendered some central thing in our lives detrimental to us. This functional depression is signalling us to let it die and move on.” “Overreaction to depression essentially reinforces learned toxic shame. It reinforces the person’s belief that he is unworthy, defective and unlovable when he is depressed.” “Sadly this typically drives him deeper into abandonment-exacerbated isolation.” p. 251

“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.” p. 125

Many sensations are fear: tightening in musculature (jaw, throat, chest, diaphragm, belly, alimentary canal), more intense sensations of fear include nausea, jumpiness, feeling wired shortness of breath, hyperventilation, alimentary distress. Mindfulness involves noticing the tendency to dissociate from these sensations. “Over and over, the survivor will need to rescue himself from dissociation, and gently bring his awareness back into fully feeling the sensations of his fear. Although sensations of fear sometimes feel unbearable at first, persistent focusing with non-reactive attention dissolves and resolves them as if awareness itself is digesting and integrating them.” p. 252

This works through more and more feelings of grief and then can begin to work through depression (feelings include: heaviness, swollenness, exhaustion, emptiness, hunger, longing, soreness, or deadness). Mindfulness digests them and integrates them into consciousness. “One of the biggest challenges of mindfully focusing on depression is to not dissociate into sleep. Sitting up straight in a comfortable chair can help to keep you awake and focused on fully feeling and metabolizing your depression.” p. 253

When critic is very loud and intense, best strategy is to focus on feeling sensations.p. 255

Gabor Mate. Attachment hunger. Confused with real hunger, source of food addictions and food soothing. p. 256

Tiredness can be abandonment depression. p. 256

Example of flashback (generally a mundane, everyday kind of thing): “Cooking…became a central piece of my self-remothering work. It was not until I realized how much I rushed around when I was cooking. Via increased mindfulness, I discovered that the smallest unforeseen obstacle could set off what felt like a small electric shock in my chest. Examples of these obstacles include something spilled, a lid too tight to open, an extra unanticipated task, or the clock showing me that I was behind schedule. In an instant, anyone of these normal hindrances could send me rushing around the kitchen in a low grade panic. Whenever this occurred, I would then inhale my meal as soon as it was ready just to get the ordeal over with….With ongoing recovery work, I realized that anything to do with food could easily flash me back to the family dinner table – the battlefield of my dysfunctional family.(cont.) 
(cont.)Many productive grieving sessions came out of this. They lead me to an epiphany that doing anything intricate with lots of steps to it also flashed me back to feeling picked apart by my parents. I subsequently discovered that angering at my parents, whenever I was triggered by doing something complicated, significantly reduced my fear.” p. 260

“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.(cont.)
(cont.)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.(cont.)
(cont.)No one is safe enough to shine with, to do “show and tell” 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. (cont.)
(cont.)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.” p. 267

“…the therapist needs to be able to tolerate and work therapeutically with the sudden evaporation of trust that is so characteristic of Cptsd. Trauma survivors do not have a volitional “on” switch for trust, even though their “off” switch is frequently automatically triggered during flashbacks. In therapy, the therapist must be able to work on reassurance and trust restoral over and over again. I have heard too many disappointing client stories about past therapists who got angry at them because they would not simply choose to trust them.” p. 268

“Empathy involves immersing yourself in another’s psychological state by feeling yourself into the other’s experience.” – Kohut p. 269

“When I delve deeply enough into a client’s experience, no matter how initially perplexing or intemperate it may at first seem, I inevitably find psychological sense in it, especially when I recognize its flashback components. In fact, I can honestly say that I have never met a feeling or behavior that did not make sense when viewed through the lenses of transference and traumatology.(cont.)
(cont.)Empathy, of course, deepens via careful listening and full elicitation of the client’s experience, along with the time-honored techniques of mirroring and paraphrasing which show the client the degree to which we get him.” p. 269

“I came to value therapeutic vulnerability the hard way via its absence in my own therapy with a therapist who was of the old, “blank screen” school. She was distant, laconic, and over-withholding in her commitment to the psychoanalytic principle of “optimal frustration.” Therapy with her was actually counter-therapeutic and shame-exacerbating for me as we reenacted a defective child/perfect parent dynamic.” p. 270-271

 

“My therapist’s modeling that anger, sadness, fear, and depression were emotions that could be healthily expressed helped me to renounce the pain-repressing, emotional perfectionism in which I was mired. With her, I learned to stop burying my feelings in the hope of being loved. I renounced my just-get-over-it philosophy and embraced vulnerability as a way of finally getting close to people.(cont.)
(cont.)I needed this kind of modeling, as so many of my clients have, to begin to emerge from my fear of being attacked, shamed or abandoned for feeling bad and having dysphoric feelings. In order to let go of my Sisyphean salvation fantasy of achieving constant happiness, I needed to experience that all the less than shiny bits of me were acceptable to another human being. Seeing that she was comfortable with and accepting of her own happy feelings eventually convinced me that she really was not disgusted by mine.” p. 271

“I repeatedly express my genuine indignation that the survivor was taught to hate himself. Over time, this often awakens the survivor’s instinct to also feel incensed about this travesty. This then empowers him to begin standing up to the inner critic. This in turn aids him to emotionally invest in the multidimensional work of building healthy self-advocacy.(cont.) 
(cont.)Furthermore, I also repeatedly respond with empathy and compassion to the survivor’s suffering. With time, this typically helps to awaken the recoveree’s capacity for self-empathy. She then gradually learns to comfort herself when she is in a flashback or otherwise painful life situation. Less and less often does she surrender to an inner torture of self-hate, self-dissapointment, and self-abandonment.(cont.)
(cont.)My most consistent feedback from past clients is that responses like these – especially ones that normalize fear and depression – helped them immeasurably to deconstruct their perfectionism, and open up to self-compassion and self-acceptance.” p. 272

“Dialogicality occurs when two conversing people move fluidly and interchangeably between speaking [an aspect of healthy narcissism] and listening [an aspect of healthy codependence]. Such reciprocal interactions prevent either person from polarizing to a dysfunctional narcissistic or codependent type of relating.(cont.) 
(cont.)Dialogicalty energizes both participants in a conversation. Dialogical relating stands in contrast to the monological energy-theft that characterizes interactions whereby a narcissist pathologically exploits a codependent’s listening defense. Numerous people have reverberated with my observation that listening to a narcissist monologue feels as if it is draining them of energy. (cont.)
(cont.)I have become so mindful of this dynamic that, in a new social situation, a sudden sense of tiredness often warns me that I am talking with a narcissist. How different than the elevation I sense in myself and my fellow conversant in a truly reciprocal exchange. Again, I wonder if there are mirror neurons involved in this…(cont.)
(cont.)…In therapy, dialogicality develops out of a teamwork approach – a mutual brainstorming about the client’s issues and concerns. Such an approach cultivates full exploration of ambivalences, conflicts and other life difficulties. (cont.)
(cont.)Dialogicality is enhanced when the therapist offers feedback from a take-it-or-leave-it stance. Dialogicality also implies respectful mutuality. It stands in stark contrast to the blank screen neutrality and abstinence of traditional psychoanalytic therapy, which all too often reenacts the verbal and emotional neglect of childhood.(cont.)
(cont.)I believe abstinence commonly flashes the client back into feelings of abandonment, which triggers them to retreat into “safe” superficial disclosure, ever-growing muteness and/or early flight from therapy.” p. 275

“All this being said, extensive dialogicality is often inappropriate in the early stages of therapy. This is especially true, when the client’s normal narcissistic needs have never been gratified, and remain developmentally arrested.(cont.) 
(cont.)In such cases, clients need to be extensively heard. They need to discover through the agency of spontaneous self-expression the nature of their own feelings, needs, preferences and views.” p. 275

Perhaps rise of coaching has been a response to the problems of traditional therapy. p. 277

“…last phase of therapy is often characterized by increasing dialogicality – a more balanced fluidity of talking and listening. This conversational reciprocity is a key characteristic of healthy intimacy. Moreover, when therapy is successful, progress in mutuality begins to serve the client in creating healthier relationships in the outside world.” p. 278

“Collaboritve rapport repair is the process by which relationships 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.(cont.)
(cont.)I believe most people, if they think about it, realize that their best friends are those with whom they have had a conflict and found a way to work through it. Once a friendship survives a misattunement, it generally means that it has moved through the fair-weather-friends stage of relationship.” p. 280-281

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.” p. 281

How he approaches modeling misattunements: “Firstly, I identify the misattunement [e.g. “I think I might have misunderstood you.”] And secondly, I then model vulnerability by describing what I think might be my contribution to the disconnection.(cont.)
(cont.)Abbreviated examples of this are: “I think I may have just been somewhat preachy…or tired… or inattentive…or impatient… or triggered by my own transference.” Owning your part in a conflict validates the normality of relational disappointment and the art of amiable resolution.(cont.)
(cont.)Taking responsibility for your role in a misunderstanding also helps to deconstruct the client’s outer critic belief that relationships have to be perfect. At the same time, it models a constructive approach to resolving conflicts, and over time leads most clients to become interested in exploring their contribution to the conflict. This becomes an invaluable skill which they can then take into their outside relationships.” p. 282

“…I believe that one of the most common reasons that clients terminate prematurely is the gradual accumulation of dissatisfactions that they do not feel safe enough to bring up or talk about. How sad it is that all kinds of promising relationships wither and die from an individual or couple’s inability to safely work through differences and conflict. (See toolbox 4, chapter 13)

“Earned secure attachment is a newly recognized category of healthy attachment.” p. 285

“I have also witnessed a significant difference in survivors who were helped in childhood to see that it was not their fault that they were being traumatized. When there was one witnessing adult who sufficiently decried what was being done to them, most did not develop such a ferocious, self-annihilating critic. Typically this was the other parent, an enlightened older sibling, a relative, a teacher or a kindly neighbor.” p. 288

Bibliotherapy: describes the very real term of being positively and therapeutically influenced by what you read. Can help with “abject isolation and alienation.” Clients who make the most progress are those who augment therapy with reading homework. p. 303

Realized his therapeutic journey started much before his official therapy with reading and realizing there are trustworthy adults who can teach you better ways. For me- M. Scott Peck and George Feuerstein. p. 304

Read Walt Whitman Song of Myself and Song of the Open Road. p. 304