Complex PTSD and Maladaptive Behaviors

Today I want to explore how our childhood traumas have such a profound impact on who we became as adults.  Many men, such as myself, instinctively dissociated from the pain and confusion inflicted upon our newly-forming sense of self and nascent understanding of the world.  In other words, we had no real choice but to avoid confronting the horrors we endured simply to survive as we awaited and reached for the false safety of adulthood.  

I specifically detached from my experiences until I was 32 years old - over 12 years after the final incident - by subconsciously dismissing what happened (repression), consciously pushing aside thoughts and memories (suppression), or flat out deceiving myself and others by downplaying the true severity or impact. 

It came easy to simply insist my childhood was normal and that “of course” there aren’t any ongoing consequences.  To do otherwise was, in my mind, admitting that I was weak-minded and so soft that I couldn’t even get past things which happened when I was a child.  I'm a strong and resilient man who toughs things out damn it! 

Yet it isn’t about being tough-minded or strong-willed.  There were plenty of signs that I had some deep-seated issues which needed to be addressed.  Back in the day when I used to get into fights, I would never remember the first shot I took.  The beginnings of those altercations were never part of my memory.  I always blacked out for a split second (even when it wasn't a blow to the head) and then I'm back.  It's the most bizarre thing, but I never really contemplated why that happened. 

Then through therapy and research I began learning about the dissociative aspects of my mind, which stemmed from the prolonged physical and psychological abuse I sustained as a child.  It was my brain's way of shutting off right when I would start to absorb the blows from my father in an apparent attempt to anesthetize and protect me.  I’ve since tried to explain this as going into mini-shock.  Of course, the pain of successive blows brought me right back to reality... but it is truly bizarre (and a little awe-inspiring) to recognize how adaptive the human brain is. 

This was also how I came to truly comprehend how my coping mechanisms, which were so effective in childhood, were utterly destructive when implemented in the adult world.  This is essentially what is meant by “maladaptive.”  For example, the "mini-shock" reaction helped me not feel the initial attacks from my father during childhood, but it put me at an absurd disadvantage during fights once I got older.  It was adaptation to my traumatic world as a kid but ended up being quite bad for me later. 

I'm not terribly concerned with addressing the particular issue related to fighting because I'm not an idiot teenager/20-something anymore and my last fight was over a decade ago.  However, there are plenty more maladaptive behaviors from childhood which I've subsequently had to overcome or are currently still trying to overcome by re-wiring my brain little by little, day after day.

The significance of this makes it worth repeating: Those coping mechanisms which served us fairly well throughout our disturbing youth are at best unhealthy during adulthood in virtually any context.  It’s okay to be self-absorbed as a child/young adult because your job is basically to focus on yourself and become the best adult version of yourself possible.  Once adulthood hits - and I mean the adulthood of responsibilities - the problems arise as you navigate workplace politics… romantic relationships… new and ever-changing social groupings... parenting your children… and all of the other ways in which adults must become those social animals evolution demand we be. 

Those preservation tactics from my youth are predicated on withdrawal, sole reliance on self, and distrust of virtually everyone.  Those tactics continue to be the ones I initially reach for even now.  I cognitively know adults don’t effectively function this way with all of the responsibilities and pressures associated with career/family/etc, but I still have to work hard at recognizing when I do these things.  That’s what I mean by “doing the work” in recovery.

I do my best to recognize when I use these maladaptive tactics, but it continues to normally come after the fact.  But that’s okay for now.  My therapist uses a football analogy.  Very rarely do you get to score on the first play of a drive.  So I shouldn’t expect myself to completely change my behaviors in this area immediately.  As long as I’m being introspective and honest with myself each time I have these maladaptive behaviors, then I’m moving the ball forward a little bit down the field.  Recognize them often enough, continue to determine more productive and positive methods which would have been better, and I’m slowly but surely retraining my brain to respond differently to various triggers… and that’s the touchdown at the end.

There's a concept called neuroplasticity about which I will go into great detail in a future post because it lies at the heart of why we can fully recover from CPTSD, unlike other diagnoses which require medication and therapy for life.  The basic idea behind neuroplasticity is that parts of the human brain were “wrecked” to a certain extent by the traumas which resulted in CPTSD, but the brain is elastic enough to withstand the wreckage and be “rewired” through recovery as with the process I just explained above.  I’ve already started seeing the results, and I’m working harder than ever as a result.

No matter how much progress you and I make in our recovery, whatever occurred during our life to necessitate recovery in the first place will always be a part of our life story.  We’ve spent so much effort dissociating ourselves willfully or not from the pain of those incidents that the mere thought of outright owning them as our own seems absurd and terrifying.  During my recovery I begrudgingly acknowledged the need to own those parts of myself that I wanted so much to push away, but it was only after many false starts that I finally “got it.” 

I can tell you from experience that this is a painful process.  Those distressing realities of our past need to be embraced as obstacles we will conquer, and only then can we dispatch their current destructive power.  We can become free and whole again by embracing our traumatic history, understanding how our previous defenses have become our current maladaptive behaviors, and then doing the work to retrain our brain away from using them.