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.