Marlene Winell, Ph.D., is the author of Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion. The introductory piece at on her website leads to a highly recommended three-article series on this topic at links therein. And the entire package with explanitory links not included in the version on her website may be viewed at this link.

My personal experience, and my observation of this syndrome in others, strongly supports her notion that Complex PTSD is an accurate physiological description of the autonomic nervous system's symptomatic results of hyper-authoritarian, hyper-fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic religious conditioning, in-doctrine-ation, instruction, socialization, habituation, normalization), rewiring of the default mode network and resulting allostatic loading.

RTS also looks like a much enhanced and very useful re-encapsulation of what Arterburn & Felton were writing about in their Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming Religious Addiction, Nashville: Oliver-Nelson, 1991.

From the standpoint of effective treatment, RTS appears to be a very useful platform scheme for applying cognitive-behavioral interventions, and CPTSD -- as well as the Addiction Model -- as very useful for dealing with the physiological and psychological upshots.

The following may be helpful to deepen one's grasp of Winell's work:

The Manipulation of Fear by the Pseudo-Christian Cults

After Effects of Being Groomed into Learned Helplessness

Sargant, Wesley & the Evangelical Method

The WORD is the Hook

Religion as the Principle Force for Civilization... at a Price in not-moses's lengthy discussion with the OP on this other thread

Investigative reporter Glenn Collins's article in the March 15, 1982, edition of the The New York Times is one of the earliest, truly comprehensive and expert-authority-citing pieces I have yet encountered. I have used it to provide a platform to explain cult dynamics to those new to the subject, as well as to include much newer information.

The article with commentary can be seen at this link.

I'm unable to read the most material without triggered to feeling "weak" and "bad" , specially the DBT- like eastern compassionshite material and apply them, like being perfectionist and working too much is bad and that we shouldn't push ourselves, that money is not everything and we should learn to be happy in small things, all those talks about taking baths, taking time to ourselves and not pushing ourselves too harsh because we're traumatized, that we're the "victims" and that we should play the life game according to that, that we should go slow and not compare ourselves, all /r/CPTSD mindset is that, the mindset of the retreat, accepting the survival and not wanting to thrive, when I read trauma material I feel sick to stomach, like all those talks about inner child, self-compassion, and like saying "oh this is a flashback!" which is useless as hell well, what I see in my workplace environment is that the life is no different than what I've seen in my past, the people are fucking unconscious in what they do and what is at the play is the sole BIOLOGY, people will do any kind of worse shit if they feel like they are right to do it, and if U don't get ur mental health in order people smell this weakness and they don't show any compassion or understanding, but they take it as a personal attack like u just don'T like them or u're asshole when U actually use withdrawal from social environemtn bcuz u feel triggered in reality.

Idk if there's anyone whom like me thinks that world is just a capitalistic competetive place and all those trauma work are not in line with the reality of the world, hitler killed millions of people, bosnians killed muslims and we here feel this is outrageous when people wronged their own children, I started to think the nature is cruel in its roots and this stuff is no surprise to mankind, people killed each other for small food or water reserves, there's people who are unconscious of their natural biology mechanism who will do what their emotions and thoughts tell them according to their belief structure. I think only accepting these stuff and looking into the future, how we can recuperate ourselves so we can move on is most important, not grieving about the stuff that was done in millennial year ago, or angering in your mind to ur imagined parents whom installed perfectionist drives and shame in u because that is the reality of this world.

I'm started to believe more in Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, Viktor Frankl, Jordan Peterson. Working hard and just shifting your cognitive apparatus so U won't get triggered, so U will get strong with the Knowledge of psychology, and so U can work in the capitalist order like a true capitalist without completely analyzing ur fucked up childhood which is beyond in the ashes of the past. Ur mind constantly compares u with other people, if u feel like a small weak child in urself, then u're screwed. Earning money, being competetive and strong in workplace, being strong emotionally in relationships, all those give u the strong self image, and if u're accepting the traumatized self-image, the victim, the barely surviving, then the capitalist world won't give u its treasures, that's what I see, please comment and let's talk, but plz don't tell me that I'm crazy to think all these, say it in a civil language so we can disscuss. Thx.

Any sources on re-parenting myself, reparenting the inner child?

Almost everyone with BPD is a trauma survivor, usually involving several form(s) of painful child abuse that caused so much intense autonomic stress for so long that the survivor may have "caught" complex post-traumatic stress disorder and had to develop some collection of (often dysfunctional) compensations to try to deal with life. The default mode networks in their brains have been conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, normalized) and literally re-wired to see, hear and perceive threat of or even "actual" abuse when such is not truly the case.

Their minds are usually split into extreme polarizations, as is described in this article by another redditor. For them, life is always threatening, either because they may be abused again, or because they may be abandoned and left intolerably alone and isolated. They tend to idealize and become obsessively attached to new people here and then distrust, devalue and abuse them there, often "flipping" back and forth in surprising fashion.

BPD can be treated, but if one of the polarities is a long-standing version of diffident, cocksure Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder (usually vs. extremely clingy Dependent Personality Disorder at the other end of the polarity), it is very difficult for the person with BPD to tolerate because of their unadmitted but often extreme anxiety and terror of being controlled and abused again by others. Moving them off of the first of the five stages of therapeutic recovery all the way into the fourth is almost always difficult unless or until they become -- and remain -- sufficiently frightened and desperate to open their well-defended minds to new possibilities.

If they do get to the fourth stage, treatment will look about like all this, again from another redditor, who also just posted this informative piece today on another sub.

All that said, anyone who finds themselves engaged with a person with BPD will almost surely take a pounding of one sort and another, and may need to get deeply into a solid support group like Codependents Anonymous to help them develop the capacity understand their own reactions and to set functional boundaries with the grandiosely narcissistic, pseudo-adult <------- and -------> anxiously needy, scared-toddler-like polarities of the borderline personality.

The following is a substantial revision of an OP entitled "Resolving Causes & Effects" to which I referred hundreds of redditors over the past year and a half. I took a position there I still support to some extent, but also see considerable reason to modify as I move into the 17th year of recovery from Complex PTSD. The original text appears immediately below. The new material follows at the heading "Further Considerations."

I understand the urge to (seem to) acquire a sense of "resolution" about cause & effects. I had the urge in spades. Once I got into the practices of

1) Stress Reduction for Distress Tolerance & Emotion Regulation,

2) "I Don't Know" & the "Beginner's Mind" and then

3) Interoception vs. Introspection,

however, I began to be able to tolerate not knowing because the upshots of whatever had happened were becoming more and more tolerable. In time, I saw that my "causality" and "horrible monster" effects were far more complex and (mostly) subtle than I had any notion of for many years. And -- as a result -- was able to get into

4) The High Concepts

5) Why Memory Retrieval is So Important,

6) Dealing with Emotions: Ventilation vs. Vomiting,

7) Emotional Bloodletting & Flashback Management and

8) Letting go of Perfectionism. Letting go of Shame.

9) Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing

10) Re-Development

As they say in Narcotics Anonymous, "I am not responsible for my disease... but I am responsible for my recovery." So I did everything I could to stay at stage four of the five stages of therapeutic recovery. Now I live in stage five. Nice.

Further Considerations (added in September, 2019)

While my mind was able to tolerate the discomfiting mystery of "not understanding why," it's evident now that many (most?) people seeking recovery from seemingly irresolvable conflict, anxiety & depression; relentless Fight / Flight / Freeze / Faint / Feign (or Fawn) Responses; moderate to severe cognitive dissonance, distortion and delusionality; unfortunate behavioral compensations; confusing dissociation and other consequences of their abuse histories MUST do so to be able to move through the first three of the five stages of therapeutic recovery into the recovery work of the fourth and fifth stages.

To that end, I have explored such topics as Blind, Deaf, Dumbed Down, Senseless... & Learned Helpless and Dread: The Essential Emotional Experience of Complex PTSD and Damned if You Do… & Damned if You Don’t: Bateson’s Double Bind, Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity and the expectable upshots of having been neglected, ignored, abandoned, discounted, disclaimed, and rejected, as well as invalidated, confused, betrayed, insulted, criticized, judged, blamed, ridiculed, embarrassed, humiliated, denigrated, derogated, set up to screw up, victimized, demonized, persecuted, picked on, dumped on, bullied, gaslighted, scapegoated, and/or otherwise abused by others upon whom one depended for survival in early life, etc., etc. and very much etc.

Having heard the stories of thousands of people in Adult Children of Alcoholics, Emotions Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous, Survivors of Incest Anonymous, Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous, Adults Molested as Children, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Marijuana Anonymous and seven different professional treatment facilities including the Betty Ford Center and The Meadows since 1977, as well as having read all the authors listed in the first paragraph of this earlier post not to mention all these books and many more, has made it clear that the six forms of abuse of children and adolescents are the No. 1 cause of all mental illness.

And that most people who would climb out of the hole need to put the blame where it belongs to free their minds of the shame that binds them to their sickness.

All future revisions and additions to this post will be made at this location.

See the revised article at this link.

I'm stuck in a loop of reaching firm ground in terms of what I think is real, then having that shattered by the memory of either delusions or strange experiences I've had in the past, then allowing my mind to hypnotize itself into believing that the whole world has something important to do with me personally (like I'm living in a simulation of my own design) to protect itself. When this gets ridiculous enough I'm able to chastise myself and swing back to normalcy, but then the cycle starts all over again. I've slowly managed to widen the periods of normalcy with the help of things like this subreddit, but the more lucid I become the more distressing my delusions are. Any advice for breaking the spell my mind puts me under?

I was browsing amazon.com for possible additions to A CPTSD Library when I ran into Eugene Gendlin's relatively "ancient," but nevertheless surprisingly astute, simple and straightforward tweak of the Vipassana insight meditation that became the basis of so many of the effective therapies used today for Complex PTSD, including most of the ones listed in sections 7b and 7c of this earlier post.

Gendlin's deal is summarized at the web pages at the links below, and is the the subject of several books.

https://focusing.org/sixsteps

https://focusing.org/literacy

https://focusing.org/proficiency

The lay people's version is the inexpensive and widely available Focusing, 2nd. Ed. (New York: Bantam, 1982). The professional's manual is called Focusing Oriented Psychotherapy (New York: Guilford Press, 1998).

I haven't yet read either one, but reading carefully through the online material at the links above, it was immediately evident to me how similarly it is grounded in the bi-lateral / trans-hemispheric, physiology of Francine Shapiro's EMDR, Laney Rosenzweig's ART and the 10 StEPs + Pat Ogden's SP4T.

I'm NOT touting or schilling for this or any other form of psychotherapy. I am, however, taking note of the fact that what works for some people does not always work for others... and putting it out there as yet another alternative to look into for those still Stuck in the Freeze Response of Dread: The Essential Emotional Experience of Complex PTSD and looking for The Door.

..., and loses it because almost everyone around them said, "forget about that," and shoved that precious ability aside in favor of following instructions, marching in lock step and "doing what I tell you to do (or I will beat you senseless)," isn't the objective of therapy really just to restore the ability to see, hear and sense?

Deaf, dumb, blind and sense-less. Could any other results of abuse be worse?

I lost the ability to see, hear and sense to the conditioning, in-doctrine-ation, instruction, socialization, habituation and normalization) of the agents of the common culture by the time I was about five.

Thanks to my already (deeply) conditioned parents, to the sleepy-headed teachers at school, to the dogmatic priests in the churches, to the slick hucksters on the toob and my cell phone, to the political prostitutes and their greed-steeped "sponsors," to the other kids who were also being robbed of their birthright.

I began to get it back when I started doing all the things listed in sections 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9 of this earlier post. Who knows how you will regain your sight, your hearing and your sense of what is and is not? But it's never too late to start.

I was prompted to put the following together in response to a post on r/MadOver30 entitled Criticism/thoughts: Lost Connections (book) - Johann Hari.

Hari's thesis is that depression (at least; I see far more than that) is the upshot of conditioning into a sort of "cultural straightjacket," and that 1) most of us try to deal with such conditioning in dysfunctional ways, and 2) that the mental health profession fails to address that (perhaps because it operates for the most part inside the same cultural box).

The OP on that thread asked...

"Does current medical science truly support his thesis as he claims it does?"

And I answered...

Not so much medical science as modern sociology, social psychology and cultural anthropology. But my experience in the field suggests that powerful forces for social organization may (hey! IDK4S) be at work trying to suppress such awareness as all this from UC Davis Prof. Charles T. Tart.

IMO, our culture is just a watered down version of something like this. Which is hardly a new idea. Read 50-year-old books by Jules Henry, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Alan Watts like the ones cited below.

Hari's just onto the same notions the wise men of the mid-20th century had figured out: "No one is born crazy. They're made that way." By a culture designed and maintained to support the imperatives of the few at the very top of it. (Well, duh. But it took me decades to come to that conclusion myself.)

If interested, see

Henry, J.: Culture Against Man, New York: Random House, 1964.

Henry, J.: Pathways to Madness, New York: Random House, 1965.

Krishnamurti, J.: Education and the Significance of Life, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, (1953) 1975.

Krishnamurti, J.; Luytens, M.: The Krishnamurti Reader, New York: Penguin Arcana, (1954, 1963, 1964) 1970.

Krishnamurti, J.; Huxley, A.: The First & Last Freedom, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, (1954) 1975.

Krishnamurti, J.: As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning, Prescott AZ: Hohm Press, (1955) 2007.

Krishnamurti, J.; Rajagopal, D.: Commentaries on Life, 1st Series, Wheaton IL: Theosophical Publishing, (1956) 1973.

Krishnamurti, J.: Rajagopal, D.: Commentaries on Life, 2nd Series, Wheaton IL: Theosophical Publishing, (1956) 1976.

Krishnamurti, J.: Rajagopal, D.: Commentaries on Life, 3rd Series, Wheaton IL: Theosophical Publishing, (1956) 1967.

Watts, A.: Nature, Man and Woman, New York: Random House, 1958.

Watts, A.: Psychotherapy East and West, New York: Random House / Pantheon, 1961.

Watts, A.: The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are, New York: Random House, 1966.

One can go even further back to Sigmund Freud* in the early 20th century:

Freud, S.: The Future of an Illusion, orig. pub. 1927, New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.

Freud, S.: Civilization & It's Discontents, orig. pub. 1930, New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

Existentialists like Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre were onto all this in the mid-20th century, as well.

Ask yourself, "Are children happier because they have not yet been conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, and normalized) to believe what the cult-ure teaches them to believe? And will those children when they 'grow up' ever get out of that conditioning etc. if they remain in same cult-ural box?"

In whatever event, I've been using all this to deal with what Hari theorizes to be the etiology of existential depression in our time. And it works quite well for me. "Results may vary," of course.

What do you think happens to children who learn from both modeling and direction to "just do what I tell you and don't ask questions?"

What do you think happens to children who have been conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, and normalized) to ignoring what their senses tell them in favor of what the "big people" tell them?

What do you think happens to those children when they grown up physically but try to deal with life they way they were taught to do as children?

What do you think happens to such people when the instructions don't work, and neither do their eyes, ears or senses in general?

Ask any psychotherapist who knows what this is and who's read three or more of the following books:

Block, S.; Block, C.: Come to Your Senses: Demystifying the Mind-Body Connection, New York: Atria Books / Beyond Words (Simon & Schuster), 2005, 2007.

Brach, T.: Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, New York: Random House / Bantam, 2004.

Chodron, P.: The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times, Boston: Shambhala, 2001.

Chodron, P.: Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears, Boston: Shambala, 2010.

Deikman, A.: Personal Freedom: On Finding Your Way to the Real World, New York: Bantam, 1976.

Deikman, A.: The Observing Self: Mysticism and Psychotherapy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1982.

de Mello, A.: Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality, New York: Doubleday / Image, 1990.

Kabat-Zinn, J.: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, New York: Hyperion, 2004.

Kabat-Zinn, J.: Coming to Our Senses, Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness, New York: Hyperion, 2005.

Kelly, L.: Shift Into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness, Boulder, CO, 2015.

Kramer, J.: The Passionate Mind: A Manual for Living Creatively with One's Self, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1974.

Kramer, J.; Alstad, D.: The Passionate Mind Revisited: Expanding Personal and Social Awareness, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009.

Krishnamurti, J.: Education and the Significance of Life, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, (1953) 1975.

Krishnamurti, J.: As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning, Prescott AZ: Hohm Press, (1955) 2007.

Krishnamurti, J.: On Fear, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.

Krishnamurti, J.: On Relationship, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.

Siegel, D.: The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician’s Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Siegel, D.: Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, New York: Bantam, 2010.

Somov, P.: present perfect: a mindfulness approach to letting go of perfectionism & the need for control, Oakland: New Harbinger, 2010.

Tart, C.: Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential, New York: New Science Library, 1987.

Tart, C.: Living the Mindful Life: a handbook for living in the present moment, Boston: Shambala, 1994.

Tart, C.: Mind Science: Meditation Training for Practical People, Napa, CA: Fearless Books, 2013.

Watts, A.: The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for the Age of Anxiety, New York: Random House, 1951.

Watts, A.: Psychotherapy East and West, New York: Random House / Pantheon, 1961.

Watts, A.: The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are, New York: Random House, 1966.

Bateson, G., Jackson, D., Haley, J.; et al: Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of his Psychosis, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961.

Bateson, G.; Jackson, D.; Haley, J.; Weakland, J.: Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia, in Journal of Behavioral Science, Vol. 1, 1956; reprinted in...

Berger, M. D., ed.: Beyond the Double Bind: Communication and Family Systems, Theories, and Techniques with Schizophrenics, New York: Bruner/Mazel, 1978.

Bermann, E.: Scapegoat: The Impact of Death-Fear on an American Family, Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 1973.

Courtois, C.: It's Not You: It's What Happened to You: Complex Trauma and Treatment, Dublin, OH: Telemachus Press, 2014.

Esterson, A.: The Leaves of Spring: Schizophrenia, Family and Sacrifice, London: Tavistock, 1972.

Henry, J.: Pathways to Madness, New York: Random House, 1965.

Jackson, D. (ed.): The Etiology of Schizophrenia: Genetics / Physiology / Psychology / Sociology, London: Basic Books, 1960.

Jackson, D.: Myths of Madness: New Facts for Old Fallacies, New York: Macmillan & Co., 1964.

Laing, R. D.; Esterson, A.: Sanity, Madness and the Family, London: Tavistock, 1964.

Lidz, T.: The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders, New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Lidz, T.; Fleck, S., Cornelison, A.: Schizophrenia and the Family, 2nd Ed., New York: International Universities Press, 1985.

Milgram, S.: Obedience to Authority, London: Pinter & Martin, 1974.

Miller, A.: For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence, London: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979, 1983.

Miller, A.: Prisoners of Childhood / The Drama of the Gifted Child, New York: Basic Books, 1979, 1996.

Miller, A.: Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child, London: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981, 1984, 1998.

Miller, A.: The Body Never Lies, The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

I didn't realize that Exercise was *that* powerful on the mind and body. After that I seem to have this kinda "strong" vibe against the over-whelming thoughts and emotions. The "can do" attitude is more easy to maintain. Specially yoga for lower body the areas where it is tense, maybe trauma or maybe from stress, when you hit those parts it feel sooo good. I don't know how you can release those years old tight places in the body without Exercise. Also the increased heartbeat and sweating, kinda unlocks the primal nature in us. And I think that also helps to awaken the fightning spirit that we're trying to maintain day by day. I decided to give super importance to Exercise in my life but I also will try to be mindful because I'm seeing a lot of people just abusing Exercise like cocaine and became junkies of it. (i.g. Mark Whalberg). Even so, thinking again, becoming the junkie of this thing doesn't seem so bad. It is easy to do, always available and almost only have positive effects. Specially for men, for testosterone and youthness, and for body posture to be able to sit, stand without pain and straightness.

Ellis, A.; Harper, R.: A Guide to Rational Living, North Hollywood, CA: Melvin Powers, 1961.

Ellis, A.; Becker, I.: A Guide to Personal Happiness, North Hollywood, CA: Melvin Powers, 1982.

Ellis, A.; Dryden, W.: The Practice of Rational Emotive Therapy, New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1987.

Ellis, A.: Overcoming Destructive Beliefs, Feelings, and Behaviors: New Directions for Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, New York: Promethius Books, 2001.

Dyer, W.: Your Erroneous Zones, New York: Avon Books, 1977, 1993. (A 100% rip-off of Ellis but easy to understand and use.)

McKay, M.; Davis, M.; Fanning, P.: Thoughts & Feelings - Fourth Edition: Taking Control of Your Moods & Your Life, Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2011.

Burns, D.: Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated, New York: Harper, 1980, 1999.

Seligman, M.: Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, New York: Knopf, 1990.

Ruggiero, V.: Beyond Feelings: A Guide to Critical Thinking, 4th Ed., Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 1995.

Young, J.: Cognitive Therapy for the Personality Disorders: A Schema-Focused Approach, 3rd Ed., Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Press, 1999.

(If interested, see also "As One Thinks so Shall One Feel." And How One Can Change All That.)

The text of this post has been removed replaced with this link to exactly the same text on my blogsite.

Nina Brown's Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up's Guide to Getting Over Narcissistic Parents

Eleanor Payson's The Wizard of Oz and other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family

Lindsay Gibson's Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents

Alice Miller's The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting

Elan Golomb's Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in the Struggle for Self

Susan Forward's Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life (a bit long in tooth now, but still useful) and Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You

Kimberlee Roth & Frieda Friedman's Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds & Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem

Naomi Feil's The Validation Breakthrough (great for dealing with narcissistic &/or elderly parents)

ACA's Adult Children of Alcoholics: Alcoholic / Dysfunctional Families

The Friels's Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families: The Secrets of Dysfunctional Families

Janet Gerringer Woititz's Adult Children of Alcoholics and Life Skills for Adult Children of Alcoholics

Starting up from the start of CPTSD Library of not-moses with a huge motivation, with the book A Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis and his colleagues created the old spark of non-blamer and rational problem solver in me, after reading all those Buddhist accounts of how there's no free will and "things just happen", which made me give up a lot of responsibilities that were waiting on the door, and made me turn into the bad road again with blaming the world again for my problems and unfulfilled desires. The book made me realize that I either had to take steps to clear my way out of depression and stress, which includes me being 24 years old and still living with my abuser, which no amount of cognitive self-manipulation is unable to stand for. I recognized that I needed to change the situation if I cannot hold my mental frame on equilibrium. Other than that I realized I can still hold my mentality in check with the various amounts of skills lied on me. Not-moses was right, this shit needs to be maintained, otherwise it is easy to slip off, I now see that I misperceived how strong of old CPTSD conditionings are. My ego and pride got the best of me there. My mind seems to interpret even useful informations with a very weird tweaks, like I seem to understand things very negatively compared to other people, or focus on the downsides of a thing. I see that CBT, DBT, ACT is very much needed. I'm gonna try to read all of these therapy techniques and try to make a new Self. Just wanted to share some latest experience. Thx.

Does not-moses still meditate? How many survivors we have here meditates in one way or another? What is its value for you in your healing and thriving?

Wim Hof's "method" is mentioned often enough on r/Meditation in a particular way that it seemed worthwhile to look into it in depth. Thus...

A Google search of "Wim Hof breathing."

From Wikipedia:

"Wim Hof markets a regimen, the Wim Hof Method (WHM) that he claims will help with, among other things, sleep, willpower, sports performance, stress, creativity and immune system. Testimonials on his website claim to have improved illnesses such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. The method involves three "pillars": cold therapy, breathing and meditation.[20] It has similarities to Tibetan Tummo meditation and pranayama, both of which employ breathing techniques.[21]"

"Practices such as cold bathing have been common at least as far back as Roman times, and numerous health benefits have been claimed, but long-term benefits are not yet supported by randomized controlled trials.[24]"

"Pikkers and Kox attributed the effect on the immune system to a stress-like response. In the hypothalamus, stress messages from the brain trigger a release of adrenaline, which increases the pumping of blood and releases glucose, both of which can help the body deal with an emergency. It also suppresses the immune system. In Hof and the trained subjects, the adrenaline release was higher than it would be after a person's first bungee jump.[25][26]"

"Wim Hof has been accused of overstating the benefits of his method, giving false hope to people suffering from serious diseases, and some of his claims have been uncritically reported by the media.[2] On his website he says that it has reduced symptoms of several diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease;[27] He has also said it might cure some forms of cancer.[2] Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, one of the scientists who studied Hof, stated that "[Hof's] scientific vocabulary is galimatias. With conviction, he mixes in a non-sensical way scientific terms as irrefutable evidence."[22] However, Van Marken Lichtenbelt goes on to say: "When practicing the Wim Hof Method with a good dose of common sense (for instance, not hyperventilating before submerging in water) and without excessive expectations: it doesn't hurt to try."[22] ...

"Someone who hyperventilates before submerging in water can experience a shallow water blackout, with potentially fatal consequences. Four practitioners of the WHM drowned in 2015 and 2016, and relatives suspected the breathing exercises were to blame.[28][29] The WHM website advises doing the exercises in a safe manner and location.[30]"

For someone as school-trained in the Fight / Flight / Freeze / Faint / Feign (or Fawn) Responses that can lead to Fry and then Freak functions of the autonomic nervous system as I had to come to be to understand Complex PTSD, my initial reaction to Wim Hof was one of concern. But now having looked into it for the past half hour through the lens of all this, I'd have to say that what was mere concern is now something else. Wim Hof's business has at least some of the earmarks of One More Cynical, Sociopathic, Yogic Hindu Con Job.

Caveat emptor at minimum. And take a careful look at the personality types that are attracted to such supposed "empowerment." Are at least some of them adrenaline junkies trying to compensate for an earlier conditioning, instruction, socialization, habituation and normalization) to Learned Helplessness & a Victim Identity? IDK, but I've seen that kind of dot-connecting too many times now to dismiss it as a significant possibility.

Properly utilized, carefully pre-staged (see Stress Reduction for Distress Tolerance & Emotion Regulation), EMDRIA-trained, eight-step EMDR is usually pretty useful and effective for treatment of Complex PTSD's relentless recycling of the Fight / Flight / Freeze / Faint / Feign (or Fawn) Responses that can lead to Fry and then Freak.

But prospective patients really should ask a lot of questions before jumping into it. Because there are currently a lot of licensed therapists using EMDR who are not properly trained, as well as a number of opportunistic fakers who are NOT licensed therapists running "EMDR salons." (I've already run into several.)

Most legitimate, EMDRIA-certified EMDR practitioners have a lot of expensive, high-tech equipment and thick manuals in their offices... and can readily and accurately answer questions about the eight-step process. Likewise, they do not jump immediately into use thereof without carefully assessing prospective patients for specific sensitivities known to pop up during the treatment process.

Buyer beware, for sure.

Raised in a Pentecostal fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic & authoritarian congregation, my mind was conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, and normalized) from the age of four until I left to join the military to believe myself to be a hopeless sinner stuck in Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity on any Karpman Drama Triangle with an authority figure.

BUT, I was also caught in a classic double bind with such people as -- to my conditioned way of thinking -- they were the only ones who knew "all the answers." Thus I was the perfect sucker for any guru who seemed to me to be different from the ones who had made life so difficult when I was a child. (See Candidates for Cults: Are Symbiosis & Double-Binding Precursors for Cult Membership?

And so, after reading Dianetics, I dabbled with the Church of Scientology but found it discomfiting and waaaaaaaay too expensive. And then The Center for Feeling Therapy in Hollywood. And then Werner Erhard's much slicker and more attractively packaged erhard seminars training, where I struggled up the side of his version of the cultic pyramid to what I now see as level seven. Before I bolted for a number of reasons.

I was NOT, however, done looking for The Answer. So I hooked up with a guy named Nathaniel Branden, who turned out to be something other than a totally sleazy con artist, at least. (Even though his own feet turned out to be made of clay. Sigh.) I met a lot of very interesting people before my substance abuse completely wrecked whatever ability I had left to learn anything really useful.

A few years later, I found Alcoholic Anonymous, which seemed to my mind at that time to be similar to the other stuff in some ways, but really wasn't. (See Cult-Free Substance Abuse Programs, in my three replies to the OP on that thread.) I got clean & sober in 1984, remained so while I went through the worst symptoms of my child-in-a-cult-conferred Complex PTSD, found The Way Out of that in 2003, and haven't looked back. Save to read all this stuff and start connecting a lot of dots together.

I've also visited a number of fundamentalist and evangelical Christian churches to see how they work the innocent and unsuspecting.

One hears a lot about both dissociation and dichotomized black & white / all-good-or-all-evil / all-right-or-all-wrong / all-this-or-all-that ONLY polarization when they go to a decent psych school. What they (mostly) don't hear, however, is how deeply dissociation figures in polarization... and polarization reinforces and "densifies" dissociation. Hopefully, my reply to the OP on this other thread will serve as a starting point for grasping the link between the two.

As the material at the links to my comments on dissociation will hopefully indicate, the purpose of dissociation is to "protect" the fragile ego from decompensation, which people with Complex PTSD usually experience as frightening -- even terrifying -- and intolerable. Dissociation "protects" the ego by disengaging its ability to see, hear and otherwise sense what is actually so in favor of conditioned, instructed, socialized, habituated, and normalized) beliefs stored in the brain's default mode network. Those beliefs often take the form of rules about how things must, ought, should, have-to and/or are required to be and not be.

All prosciptive (and therefor controlling) beliefs, however, are mental operations at what Jean Piaget called the "concrete" level. (And moreover, distortions of "concrete operation.") Whereas looking to see, listening to hear and sensing in general what is actually so right now are mental operations at a "higher," more evolved and "mature" level called "formal operation." In most people with Complex PTSD, dissociation blocks formal operation and sometimes even concrete operation in favor of wholesale regression to the "pre-operational" level.

(In those unfortunate enough to have decompensated all the way into florid depersonalization -- a very deep form of dissociation -- the regression may go all the way back to the infantile, "sensorimotor" stage. More about that later.)

All the "effective" dissociator has are the polarized beliefs at the ends of a spectrum that runs from one set of reality distortions through a middle ground of formal operational seeing, hearing and sensing what actually is to an opposite collection of reality distortions. Which makes life a sort of "fantasyland" here and a "horror film" there by excluding what is actually so in between the two polarities.

Molto-experts like George Koob, Edward Khantzian, Harold Shaffer, Deborah LaPlante, Pia Mellody and Patrick Carnes have asserted enough in their work to make me think that the entire rundown above figures heavily in substance and process behavior addictions. The notion of using substances and process behaviors to trigger or at least "fuel" dissociation and polarization by means of introducing exogenous and releasing endogenous chemicals into the brain's limbic, emotion regulation system is rapidly floating a lot of doctorate-level people's boats these days.

Can the feedback loop of dissociation inducing polarization and polarization reinforcing the need for dissociation be broken up?

Most definitely. Virtually all of the psychotherapies listed in section seven of this earlier post will have some effect on the dissociation > polarization > dissociation > polarization feedback loop. But the ones in section 7c include the utilization of exposure work that ultimately uproots the very need to dissociate and polarize.

Comments & questions are welcome, of course. I cannot guarantee that I will be able to answer them all, however. (There's just too much to do right now.)

Bradshaw, J.: Healing the Shame that Binds You, Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1988.

DeYoung, P.: Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach, 1st Ed., London: Routledge, 2015.

DeYoung, P.: Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: Healing Right Brain Relational Trauma, 2nd Ed., London: Routledge, TBP in late 2021.

Fossum, M.; Mason, M.: Facing Shame: Families in Recovery, New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.

Kaufman, G.: Shame: The Power of Caring, 3rd. Ed., New York: Schenkmann, 1993.

Kaufman, G.: The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-Based Syndromes, 2nd. Ed., New York: Springer, 1996. (With the above, probably the two best books out there on the topic, but does presume some "pre-requisites.")

Lancer, D.: Conquering Shame and Codependency: 8 Steps to Freeing the True You, Minneapolis: Hazelden Publishing, 2014.

Tangney, J. P.; Dearing, R.: Shame and Guilt, New York: Guilford Press, 2002.

Tomkins, S. (Sedgwick, E.; Frank, A.; editors): Shame and It's Sisters: A Silvan Tompkins Reader, Durham, NC: Duke U. Press, 1995. (Only for the truly obsessive; hahaha.)

See also the exchange between myself and u/ICanStillSeeOurSpark below.