Therefore, I needed a way to help myself and understand what my issues were now and where they originated from. My search for terms like 'complex PTSD, Childhood Trauma and developmental PTSD' kept leading me to a seminar being given by Dr Laurence Heller (Bio at the end of this post).
The video is quite long but I am so glad I watched it because it changed my life as so much of it mirrored my own experiences. This video gave me such a good foundation into understanding my own issues with Complex PTSD and points towards the approach that should be taken for recovery.
Being the keen student, I took notes from this seminar and I have included them below the video (They are just notes so bear with them).
Notes from the video
At one point the person thought their life was in danger
Trauma is too much emotion for the brain to deal with
Developmental trauma time period is prebirth to leaving the home.
We have incorporated the environmental failures that we have experienced into our own 'structure', then continues to act in ways in the world that continue that environmental failure but now we have internalised them. Then we find people who resonate with our own internal difficulties and form relationships with them. Couples can relate to each other in survival styles.
5 Basic Structures
These structures are named after what is missing, compromised capacity i.e. fails to develop.
• Connection. We feel that we belong in the world. We are in touch with our body and our emotions and capable of consistent connection with others.
• Attunement. Our ability to know what we need and to recognize, reach out for, and take in the abundance that life offers.
• Trust. We have an inherent trust in ourselves and others. We feel safe enough to allow a healthy interdependence with others.
• Autonomy. We are able to say no and set limits with others. We speak our mind without guilt or fear.
• Love-Sexuality. Our heart is open and we are able to integrate a loving relationship with a vital sexuality.
• Attunement. Our ability to know what we need and to recognize, reach out for, and take in the abundance that life offers.
• Trust. We have an inherent trust in ourselves and others. We feel safe enough to allow a healthy interdependence with others.
• Autonomy. We are able to say no and set limits with others. We speak our mind without guilt or fear.
• Love-Sexuality. Our heart is open and we are able to integrate a loving relationship with a vital sexuality.
Connection : People who experience early trauma struggle with this issue of connection - Both wanting connection and being afraid of connection. People may use disassociation as the primary mechnism. Disconnected from their own bodies i.e. makes them anxious to begin telling you how they are feeling. Also socially isolating - too much connection with the body or other people is actually overwhelming. They tend to be the real thinking types and can't connect to the world normally. They are unable to filter stimulation from the environment and from other people so they have to disconnect to save themselves from being overwhelmed.
Attunement :
Missing or compromised capacity to be able to know what it is you need, capacity to express those needs with undue shame or guilt, capacity to tolerate expansion and abundance.
Develop as a result of an attachment rupture. Nourishment loss, early hospitalisation of the mother or the child. Early attachment dynamic got disrupted. POrotective mechanism that developed was to learn to dial down their needs to only what the environement had to offer.
Both Attunement and connection has a bodily and nervous system component.
With connection structure a large amount of aggression tend to be turned against the self in the form of shame and self hatred. They can also be highly sympttomatic chronic fatigue, anxiety, migraines, depression.
For developmental trauma you have to work beyond fight or flight it will only take you part of the way.
Distress cycle - nervous system issues lead to identity issues which then cause their own nervous system issues.
Significant evidence that trauma depression and anxiety that is chronic in the mother does affect the fetus, so you can get a traumatised new born who then one thing builds on another where the attachment process is more challenging (Freeze and disassociation response). Then years and year of other trauma follow : you get a freeze response so you don't have access to fight or flight or natural and healthy aggression which make you are target for other children, your orienting pattern has already been disrupted so you will be hyper or hypo vigilant so you are more vulnerable that way, boundaries have been compromised so you are vulnerable in all kinds of ways. By the time you hit 30 that has been significant life trauma. One thing building on the other.
Disassociation (found in connection structure) was a coping mechanism which is no longer needed sot it becomes a problem as it will continue to be reenacted even when it is inappropriate.
Attunement's coping/survival mechanism is depression. It is a mechanism as we needed to depress our needs, depress our emotions, contract, a parasympathetic freeze state. Treatment for this is to tolerate more charge, expansion, more aliveness, more connection and more relationality. It is about longing for fulfillment but energetically and psychologically not being able to allow fulfillment.
When a person gets a connection it can often feel overwhelming and then they find some way to diminish it or demean it. Find a real problem, blow them out of proportion so they don't have to deal with the challenge of learning to tolerate more connection etc.
Trust
Coerced into playing certain roles in the family they are often rewarded for selling themselves out e.g. a child who becomes a confidant to the parent or child who is used as a pawn between parents. This structure the people tend to act out their aggression rather than in.
Autonomy
The child felt invaded, controlled someone always knew what was best for them. On the receiving end of anxiety when they tried to act independently. Receiving end of threat if they tired to stand up for themselves. Threat of abandonment threat of being crushed or both. Result is they have given up on their sense of autonomy. You end up with people who are very pleasing and sweet and nice on the surface but underneath a very deep resentment and anger. A superficial yes and a very deep seated NO. They have survives by covert holding out. You may have my body but you wont have my soul. Although these people seem nice you never know where you stand with them. They wont stand up for themselves directly they can only do it indirectly. S o they will make their partner life so miserable they leave or the person will just leave one day without notice. They are internally paralyzed by their won internal contradiction. They will get other people to feel the anger around them by explaining situation so they can express the anger they cannot. They cannot express the anger because anger means loss of love.
Love/Sexuality
This is shown two ways : A person will shut down their heart with a person after a while and act out sexually with someone else or they will shut down sexually part of the relationship with someone and it just becomes love. The person struggles to integrate the two.
Each one of the survival types develops as a way of protecting the attachment relationship.
If a child is abused by a parent the child cannot express their aggression towards the partent so the child will turn it towards themselves. It protects the attachment relationship but at great cost to themselves. They cant accept that the person they care for and love is also the person abusing them. The result is self hatred, low self esteem, shame, guilt, general sense of badness.
Questions to ask - What is your relationship with anger. Common response is they get angry at themselves. Its very threatening to feel anger towards anybody because it is over coupled with attachment loss. So fight isn't available. Clients need to feel the fight response in various forms, if they don't they will always be fearful, always feel like a victim. Healthy aggression ability to move out and impact the environment/world.
Core energy that children use to express their needs, when there are unmet needs, the child will protest, sympathetic branch of the nervous system (fight/flight) the protest and the anger is just a signal to the environment to respond. This response can be met with threat so the environment becomes actively threatening so the child learns to respond pretty quickly to that type of threat and shuts it down - now into dysfunction. Anger needs to be DEALT WITH. On a psychological level it needs to be owned and at the body level it needs to be experienced without acting it out.
Pregnant and first 6 months the baby feels the state of the mother.
Clients fear other peoples anger but then they can fear their own and the fact it may become destructive and can't be managed.
Clients want to be angry and have people not go away
Children cannot see themselves as a good person in a bad situation.
If a child in pain or in distress they feel at fault for theat. This childhood perception then persists. So they then feel shame for being abused, being symptomatic.
The first structure feels shame at existing, they feel always on the outside looking in. Everybody has what they don't have.
Pride based identification develop as a counter response to shame because shame is not a good state to stay so they will develop a sense of pride in their rationality - They can't feel their emotions so they turn their shame into a virtue by making rationality and intellectuality their virtue. Emotions open the door to too much pain for them.
Attunement - Deep shame about needing and then pride in being the need provider. Implicit message is i don't have needs but everyone needs me.
Trauma stars as physiological and is the shaky foundation for what the psychological self is built on.
Trust issue is between 2-4 but does continue all through childhood.
Connection structure people are very sensitive to touch i.e. being touched.
Regression therapy is not good for developmental PTSD.
Dr Laurence Heller Bio
Dr. Heller is the founder of the NeuroAffective Relational Model™ or (NARM), a unified systemic approach for working with developmental issues and shock trauma. He has been on the faculty of several major universities and has taught courses and seminars at medical schools, hospitals and pain clinics in the U.S. and Europe.
Dr. Heller co-founded the Gestalt Institute of Denver and later the Rocky Mountain Psychotherapy Institute where he trained hundreds of mental health professionals.
Finally Dr. Heller is the co-author of Crash Course, A Self-Healing Guide to Auto Accident Trauma and Recovery published in English, German, Danish, and Italian.
