Determining Causes, De-Shaming & Resolving Effects

The following is a substantial revision of a post on Reddit 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 

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...

1) Blind, Deaf, Dumbed Down, Senseless... & Learned Helpless,

2) Dread: The Essential Emotional Experience of Complex PTSD,  

3) Damned if You Do… & Damned if You Don’t: Bateson’s Double Bind, Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity, and 

4) the many 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, used as a sex toy, 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.

Damned if You Do… & Damned if You Don’t: The Double Bind, Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity

I just experienced another, mercifully brief autonomic meltdown after having gotten bleach on a prized pair of pants. The cause was self-evident: I was too tired from doing yard work in the hot sun to change clothes when I should have. 

My wretchedly CPTSD-remodeled brain's default mode network regressed under stress and went immediately into self-recrimination and autonomic imbalance, and I had what my simple-minded, relentlessly abusive, authoritarian and anything but authoritative parents called a "temper tantrum." 

But instead of having it UNconsciously and mindlessly, I was able -- with the help of six years'  practice of this stuff -- to have it consciously and mindfully. I can still interocept the chemical residue in my score-keeping body, but my mind is calm enough to write this less than five minutes later. 

And realize that my brain's DMN was programmed, normalized and neurally hard-wired by the time I was three to a nasty double-bind that insists upon perfection here... and requires that I screw up again and again to prove that my parents were right about me being a little fuck-up there.  

The typical survivor of family-of-origin abuse was conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, and normalized as children to believe that he or she  is supposed to be a) perfect and b) screwed up... because they were told repeatedly that they were this and then told repeatedly that they were... that. 

These children grow up in a relentlessly impossible dilemma and no-win situation that is a very common feature of Diana Baumrind's concept of "authoritarian parenting" on Stephen Karpman's Drama Triangle.

The justifiably renowned Gregory Bateson wrote in the 1950s, "If the child tries in his naturally childish way to be perfect, he is damned by his abusers for this. And if he fails at it, he is damned for that."

Bateson called this squeeze play the "double bind."

Paraphrasing further:

After years of being some combination of being 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, the child slips into hopelessness, learned helplessness, dread & a victim identity.

And accepts the belief that HE is at fault... never Placing the Blame where it Truly Belongs, which, IME is a crucial component of Resolving the Causes & Effects of serial abuse.

If interested, see The "Classics" on "Crazy-Making" from the mid-20th Century:

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.

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.