Quotes About Healing

Many survivors are so identified with the critic that it becomes their whole identity. Such survivors typically need to focus on fighting off the critic until they have established the healthy ego function of self-protection.

The survivor may, seemingly without reason, visualize someone being abusive.

Some survivors have confidence but not self-esteem.

Most traumatizing parents are especially contemptuous towards the child's expression of emotional pain.

angering, crying, verbal ventilating and feeling.

As a survivor becomes more adept at angering and crying, fear of his feelings will decrease, and opportunities to learn to simply feel will present themselves.

The key point is that these labels are incomplete and unnecessarily shaming descriptions of what the survivor is actually afflicted with.

I once heard renowned traumatologist, John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet.

Thankfully, I eventually realized that I had unresolved attachment issues, and sought out a Relational therapist who valued the use of her own vulnerable and emotionally authentic self as a tool in therapy.

We can learn to be emotional in benign ways. We can have our emotions without holding onto them. We can soften and relax into our feelings without exiling or enshrining them. We can let our feelings pass through us when they have fully served their function.

Holotropic Rebirthing and Reichian therapy employ special breathing techniques to help free stuck emotions.

Spiritual awakenings, as healing and wonderful as they are, do not magically create an authentic forgiveness of our real-life abusers. Spiritual forgiveness is not an alternative to the grieving that must precede authentic, interpersonal forgiveness.

We live in an emotionally impoverished culture, and those who stick with a long term recovery process

Authentic sharing can be triggering, and sometimes flashes the survivor back to being punished or rejected for being vulnerable.

Resentment that should have been directed toward my parents often boomeranged onto me and spoiled or thwarted my efforts at self-nurturance.

Similarly, effective recovery is unwinding the natural potential you were born with out of your unconscious. This is your innate potential which may be, as yet, unrealized because of your childhood trauma.

We do not have to let other people's irresponsible emotional expression alienate us from our feelings.

The only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid unavoidable pain.

Time does not heal wounds without acknowledgement of what has happened. You need to clarify your feelings and express them in a way that defines in detail what you have lost and how much you care about what you have lost . . . – Peter Leech & Zeva Singer

Unfortunately, premature forgiveness strands us in relationships with our parents that are as devoid of genuine warmth and intimacy as ever. Unless we work through the unresolved fear and hurt our parents caused us, we will always be uneasy around them and hold them at an emotional distance. This is commonly the case even when they have outgrown their abusive ways.

Bibliotherapy is a term that describes the very real process of being positively and therapeutically influenced by what you read. As stated earlier, when it is at its most powerful, bibliotherapy is also relationally healing. It can rescue you from the common Cptsd feeling of abject isolation and alienation.

The price of admission to a relationship with an extreme narcissist is self-annihilation. One of my clients quipped: "Narcissists don't have relationships; they take prisoners.

Here we will also see how verbal and emotional abuse alone can cause Cptsd, and how profound emotional abandonment is typically at the core of most Cptsd.

Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.