Complex PTSD: How we "Catch" It. How we Recover from it.

Substantially revised for clarification 03-11- and 04-05-2021.

In my experience working with hundreds of survivors since 1987, abuse, functional abandonment (i.e. being repeatedly ignored, discounted, dismissed and/or denigrated) and/or physical and emotional neglect in early life conditions, in-doctrine-ates, instructs, imprints, socializes, habituates, and normalizes a lingering state of Learned Helplessness, Dread & the Victim Identity into a default mode network in the developing brain by the time the child is four or five. Children need to be -- and sense that they are -- seen and heard by those upon whom they depend for their very survival in the first few years of life. To know a borderline is to know someone who simply wasn't able to do that then or henceforth.

Abused, neglected and ignored children know that their parents and older siblings cannot see, hear, feel or otherwise sense them. And it terrifies them. 

Having no other frame of reference, the child matures physically... but remains everlastingly fearful of but dependent upon others (even when they assert they are not) and racing around the same sort of Karpman Drama Triangle with almost everyone in later life they raced around on with their sick, senseless families when they were infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers. Because, in fact, they are dealing with adolescence and adulthood stuck in the minds of small children who are -- for damned good reasons -- absolutely certain that they are going to abused, neglected, abandoned or ignored One More Time. 

Is there a way to get off that thing and "grow up" to be a healthy adolescent or adult? IME, yes. See Dis-I-dentifying with Learned Helplessness & the Victim I-dentity (and not-moses's answers to a replier's questions there), Re-Development, and the rest of...

A 21st Century Recovery Program for Someone with Untreated Childhood Trauma... because there's a LOT one can do without spending a fortune on psychotherapy, as well as to speed up the process if one is in therapy or at least at the fourth of the five stages of therapeutic recovery.

ADDED the day after the original posting with a bit more "emphasis," as well as referential and resource information:

IME as both a recovering borderline, someone who has worked with quite a few of them, and someone who has known well over a hundred... one will have to encounter a mental health professional who understands what BPD really is and what the person "infected" with it did and didn't get in infancy, toddlerhood and the pre-school years that left her stuck in a furball in Erikson's first four stages of psychosocial development.

At the risk of repeating myself... the adolescent or adult borderline grew up in a world that was deaf, dumb, blind and senseless to the very young child's dire need to feel seen, heard, felt and sensed by those upon who that child depends for its very survival. When that happens, the child's body matures, but it's brain remains jammed full of neural networks that know little or nothing about being comfortable in one's own skin and have extreme difficulty trusting anyone who reminds them in any way of those who let them down to begin with. 

The vast majority of licensed psychotherapists I still encounter to this day don't really get that because they blew through Child Development 501 and 502 ignoring what people like Donald Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Alice Miller, T. Barry Brazelton, Daniel Stern and Alan Schore wrote about years ago in books few of them had time to read.

(Do our psych schools turn out competent "jungle guides" or do they turn out licensing-test-passing "mechanics?" Forgive my digression.)

Sadly, in my experience this is the case among those who learned the mechanics of DBT, ACT, SEPt and even the very "high-tech" SP4T  (probably the four best psychotherapies for BPD at this time), but failed to learned the art because they don't actually understand what the hell happened.  

(And let's not even talk about the mechanical nature of EMDR. Way too many of those "therapists" were little other than wrench twisters a decade ago. Hopefully, they are are more artful now.)

Further, IME, I haven't seen many people with "good-enough-parent-less," CPTSD-driven Borderline Personality Disorder emerge from their conditioning, instruction, imprinting, socialization, habituation and normalization to being blind, deaf, clueless and senseless in a world wherein Damned if You Do & Damned if You Don’t, Double Bound, Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity is The Way It Is & Always Will Be... unless they learn how to re-experience and re-process the emotions they experienced during the first five years of their lives with something like the 10 StEPs + SP4T as those emotions come up organically in the course of living life, NOT just "in session."

Because the brain and mind of the borderline has to be Re-Developed to the extent it can be all the way back to birth and even into the last trimester of gestation if the pregnant mother was toxified with stressors herself.

This is NOT to say that these therapists aren't trying to do the best they can on the basis of what they know, nor that trauma-trained psychotherapy is a waste of time. It is NOT. What I AM saying is that very few of them really know the nature of The Problem... and one may waste valuable time with those who don't.

Added later in response to watching Jordan Peterson's response (from about the 2 hr 4 min mark to 2 hr 11 min mark) to a question from the audience at one of his lectures:

Peterson is accurate in his understanding of our reactive patterns of behavior (see below). But like so many people who come from authoritarian culture organization imperatives (which virtually all Abrahamic evangelicals and fundamentalists do) he ignores the obvious cause of BPD as an IFSM response to having been some combination of neglected, ignored, abandoned, discounted, disclaimed, rejected, invalidated, confused, betrayed, insulted, criticized, judged, blamed, shamed, ridiculed, embarrassed, humiliated, denigrated, derogated, scorned, set up to screw up, victimized, demonized, persecuted, picked on, vilified, dumped on, bullied, gaslit..., scapegoated..., emotionally blackmailed, defiled and/or otherwise abused by others upon whom they depended for survival in the first few years of life.

Peterson is a gifted propagandist who is obviously (see the comments on that YT page) singing to the authoritarian choir. But from the POV of those who deal with BPD in the psychotherapeutic trenches, he's about 30 years behind the curve. He needs to read Alice's books, for sure. And come to grips with why there's a Dissociative Splitting between "Parts" that are "Inner 2-Year-Olds" vs. "Inner 13-Year-Olds."

Because those of us who have done that tend to be more successful in helping BPD sufferers to get to and stay at the fourth and fifth of the five stages of psychotherapeutic recovery than those who have not and are still locked in Theo Millon's, Sharon Ekleberry's, Aaron Beck & Art Freeman's, Bill Meissner's and Otto Kernberg's nicely descriptive -- but almost uniformly blind, deaf, dumb and senseless as to the obvious causes and still predominant -- professional literature on the topic.

All one really has to do is a) read Margaret Mahler's. T. Barry Brazelton's, Daniel Stern's, Don Winnicott's, John Bowlby's, Richard Schwartz's and Allan Schore's books on early life attachment and maternal attunement (or lack thereof), and b) watch infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers with their confusing, clueless, over-limiting and/or emotionally disconnected parents at a place like the Barbara Sinatra Children's Center to grasp what the hell is going on.

BPD, btw, is (IME, anyway) far more common among the children of evangelical & fundamentalist, Abrahamic religious, as well as severely substance-abusing, parents than it is among the children of parents who were not distracted extremists during the patient's first five years of life. (Well, to me, anyway, duh.)

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