Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control religion. Hoo boy today’s essay is a long one. I was also going to make it a paid subscribers only essay but decided not to—I really want this information to be accessible like Pete Walker has made it accessible! Also just a note that I am not a therapist and all of this information is new to me so take everything with a giant grain of salt/feel free to sit awhile with your own responses to this information. Thank you to everyone who supports this newsletter and allows me to invest in this kind of writing and publish this kind of content! It truly means the world to me.
“In my work with clients repetitively traumatized in childhood, I am continuously struck by how frequently the various thought processes of the inner critic trigger them into overwhelming emotional flashbacks. This is because the PTSD-derived inner critic weds shame and self-hate about imperfection to fear of abandonment, and mercilessly drives the psyche with the entwined serpents of perfectionism and endangerment. Recovering individuals must learn to recognize, confront and disidentify from the many inner critic processes that tumble them back in emotional time to the awful feelings of overwhelming fear, self-hate, hopelessness and self-disgust that were part and parcel of their original childhood abandonment.” --Pete Walker, Shrinking the Inner Critic in CPTSD
About a week ago on a Sunday morning a little before 6AM our oldest child woke us up. Fern, our corgi, had barfed in their room and they wanted help cleaning it up. Krispin sleepily got up to help and I laid awake in my bed, my mind spinning with worry. Fern is sick! What if she ate something poisonous and she is going to die? How will I cope with that? This is why I can’t get attached to animals. Maybe I will get a cat if Fern dies, but I probably shouldn’t because everything I love ends up suffering painfully and then dying. This is how it always goes. What is wrong with me? Should I take Fern to the vet? How much money will that cost? Am I a terrible person for feeling worried about money? Is she in pain? How will I stand it if she dies? I won’t be able to handle it, I just know it.
These thoughts continued on for another 5-10 minutes. My younger child came in and snuggled with me and talked to me about video games and I tried to tune into what he was saying and push down the dread and anxiety I was feeling. I worried he could tell I was upset and tried as hard as I could to make sure he didn’t. I eventually got up, drank my coffee, took my anxiety meds and my blood pressure meds, ate a frozen breakfast burrito (like I do 4-5 times a week) and started working on a post for this newsletter. I was deep into reading Pete Walker’s book Complex CPTSD and was struggling to know how to corral what I was learning/thinking about into one short post.
I read a bit more in his book and was stopped in my tracks when he started talking about the two most consistent symptoms of long-term childhood abuse and neglect: the harsh inner critic and catastrophizing the future. Both of these symptoms are ones I deal with on a daily (hourly?) basis and yet I had never been told so plainly that they were both symptoms of complex childhood trauma. I recognized that my thought spiral around Fern (my beloved emotional support corgi) was a combination of catastrophizing the future (she’s going to suffer and die!) and my harsh inner critic (this always happens to me, everything I love suffers and it must somehow be connected to ME being bad).
It was nice in a way to be able to have a concrete explanation for what my inner world was like—and to recognize that having an explanation can help me start to know how to deal with these constant thought loops. But it also was really painful to realize how impacted I am by trauma. Childhood trauma, religious trauma, and also the every-day-trauma-of-being-alive1. This is the thing about doing the work to heal that is hard to talk about: the grief that underlies so many realizations. If I had only known this was trauma, and not a personality flaw I could try and fix or shame myself into changing, what would be different about my life today2?
This is what makes CPTSD so insidious, because it does what no war or earthquake or tsunami can do: It gets the victim to shame themselves, over and over again, for the trauma they have experienced. Trapped in their minds in a cycle-of self-hatred and being terrified of the future as a protective measure developed during childhood, CPTSD can rob a person of their ability to enjoy life or have insight into their own pain.
But the more we heal, the more many of us start to wonder: Is my harsh inner critic really helping me anymore? Or do I want to start to imagine another way of living?
//
“When anxious perfectionist efforts, however, fail over and over to render the parents safe and loving, the inner critic becomes increasingly hypervigilant and hostile in its striving to ferret out the shortcomings that seemingly alienate the parents. Like the soldier overlong in combat, PTSD sets in and locks the child into hypervigilance and excessive sympathetic nervous system arousal. Desperate to relieve the anxiety and depression of abandonment, the critic-driven child searches the present, and the future, for all the ways he is too much or not enough.3”
Let’s take a step back and talk a bit more about the inner critic.
More than a few years ago (it’s honestly hard for me to know—9 or 10 years?) I first realized I had a harsh inner critic—or at least one that was more intense than many other people. Like many people in evangelicalism-land, my partner and I had discovered the Enneagram typing system. Krispin was for sure a nine (the peacemaker!) and I believed I was a 4 (the artist). This was right when I was writing my first book, and I felt so much angst and was trying to write literary essays about being a fundamentalist Christian missionary who was very depressed4. I was in my feels, so I thought the Enneagram 4 fit me. Then Krispin asked me to listen to a podcast episode about the Enneagram one. I had always read about them being perfectionists, and since my house is always quite cheerfully covered with books and crafts and dust, I thought that couldn’t be me. But this podcast talked mostly about inner perfectionism and the inner critic of the enneagram one. I asked Krispin: wait, not everyone’s brain is like that? And he said no, no it’s not. He mentioned he had started to tune into the fact that I had an extra loud inner critic (which was not getting better since being in a mission order amongst the poor).
Ah ha! I thought. Ok, I have an intense inner critic, and not everyone has that. But a lot of people do, and it’s just my personality type! I was able to understand and have more compassion for people who didn’t seem to be as ethically driven as I was, and I started to have a bit of insight into what could be called my “inner” perfectionism. But this typing system didn’t give me tools for making my harsh inner critic any less loud (and instead, I took it as proof that it was “just who I was” and I couldn’t change it)5.
Through the years, my inner critic got worse and worse. I felt shitty about everything, everything! My social media was like a firehose of Bad News and people urging me to Do Something! About the Bad News! I also lived in a neighborhood where terrible things were happening all the time to my under-served and low-income neighbors. I was also writing and speaking for white evangelical Christians, who said wretched things to me constantly. I was (as my therapist would now say) replicating certain patterns in my life. I was surrounding myself with people and situations filled with trauma, and constantly putting pressure on myself to fix insurmountable systemic issues with my one little body and brain. The harder I worked (without seeing any real positive or lasting change to these big issues) the less my brain could find a single positive thing to think or even say about myself. I obsessed about problems like the housing market and lack of affordable housing, systemic racism in Christianity, anti-Muslim sentiment in the US, rapacious developers ruining my neighborhood while being fully backed by our city council, and much (much) more. All of these problems seemed SO big (because they were) and ruminating on them encouraged me to feel disgust and shame with myself. And it also actively fed my inner critic, which constantly told me: what right do I have to be happy for even a moment in a world where such atrocities were taking place?
Fast forward to 2023 and both Krispin and I have learned a lot more about trauma and CPTSD in general. Late last year / early in this year, I stopped engaging with Christian practices I had been taught in childhood, including praying and checking in with “god/jesus” to feel ok in my body and mind. This alone did wonders for my mental health, because I recognized what I was doing as spiritual bypassing. I was filled to the brim with uncomfortable emotions: sadness, anger, despair—but I had “given them to god” in the past and felt a sense of (temporary) relief. I never seemed to notice how the anxious and demoralizing thoughts came back day after day, in the morning and afternoons and evenings. When I stopped checking in with god/jesus, I could notice my inner critic a bit more and was more suspicious of it. Are all of my thoughts true and accurate perceptions of how much power I have in this world? I began to wonder. I also started to work on a multitude of ways to regulate my nervous system—and I also went low contact with people in my life who had not only fed my inner critic but kept it activated when I was around them.
I slowly began to build a framework for how some of my intrusive thoughts were related to my inner critic, but not all of them. I began to notice that certain things like social media could trigger me into long thought spirals where I became incredibly anxious and shame-filled with nothing to show for it. It has been validating and reassuring to know that I am far from the only person who deals with these kinds of mental health issues. In fact, Pete Walker—through his work with many CPTSD survivors—came up with a list of 14 common inner critic attacks. And if I can be a teensy bit bossy for a moment, I want to say this:
Get yourself a coffee, tea, sparkling water—whatever!—and sit down and thoughtfully read through these 14 common inner critic attacks. Ask yourself if you experience any of them, and how they show up to impact your mental health. And see what it would be like to practice the thought substitutions offered below!
“Here is a list of 14 common inner critic attacks divided into the key categories of perfectionism and endangerment. Each is paired with a healthier (and typically more accurate) thought-substitution response.
PERFECTIONISM ATTACKS
Perfectionism My perfectionism arose as an attempt to gain safety and support in my dangerous family. Perfection is a self-persecutory myth. I do not have to be perfect to be safe or loved in the present. I am letting go of relationships that require perfection. I have a right to make mistakes. Mistakes do not make me a mistake. Every mistake or mishap is an opportunity to practice loving myself in the places I have never been loved.
All-or-None & Black-and-White Thinking I reject extreme or overgeneralized descriptions, judgments or criticisms. One negative happenstance does not mean I am stuck in a never-ending pattern of defeat. Statements that describe me as “always” or “never” this or that, are typically grossly inaccurate.
Self-Hate, Self-Disgust & Toxic Shame I commit to myself. I am on my side. I am a good enough person. I refuse to trash myself. I turn shame back into blame and disgust, and externalize it to anyone who shames my normal feelings and foibles. As long as I am not hurting anyone, I refuse to be shamed for normal emotional responses like anger, sadness, fear and depression. I especially refuse to attack myself for how hard it is to completely eliminate the self-hate habit.
Micromanagement/Worrying/Obsessing/
Looping/ Over-Futurizing I will not repetitively examine details over and over. I will not jump to negative conclusions. I will not endlessly second-guess myself. I cannot change the past. I forgive all my past mistakes. I cannot make the future perfectly safe. I will stop hunting for what could go wrong. I will not try to control the uncontrollable. I will not micromanage myself or others. I work in a way that is “good enough”, and I accept the existential fact that my efforts sometimes bring desired results and sometimes they do not. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference” - The Serenity PrayerUnfair/Devaluing Comparisons To others or to one’s most perfect moments. I refuse to compare myself unfavorably to others. I will not compare “my insides to their outsides”. I will not judge myself for not being at peak performance all the time. In a society that pressures us into acting happy all the time, I will not get down on myself for feeling bad.
Guilt Feeling guilty does not mean I am guilty. I refuse to make my decisions and choices from guilt; sometimes I need to feel the guilt and do it anyway. In the inevitable instance when I inadvertently hurt someone, I will apologize, make amends, and let go of my guilt. I will not apologize over and over. I am no longer a victim. I will not accept unfair blame. Guilt is sometimes camouflaged fear. – “I am afraid, but I am not guilty or in danger”.
"Shoulding”I will substitute the words “want to” for “should” and only follow this imperative if it feels like I want to, unless I am under legal, ethical or moral obligation.
Overproductivity/Workaholism/Busyholism I am a human being not a human doing. I will not choose to be perpetually productive. I am more productive in the long run, when I balance work with play and relaxation. I will not try to perform at 100% all the time. I subscribe to the normalcy of vacillating along a continuum of efficiency.
Harsh Judgments of Self & Others/Name-Calling I will not let the bullies and critics of my early life win by joining and agreeing with them. I refuse to attack myself or abuse others. I will not displace the criticism and blame that rightfully belongs to them onto myself or current people in my life. “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself”. - Jane Eyre
ENDANGERMENT ATTACKS
Drasticizing/Catastrophizing/Hypochondrisizing I feel afraid but I am not in danger. I am not “in trouble” with my parents. I will not blow things out of proportion. I refuse to scare myself with thoughts and pictures of my life deteriorating. No more home-made horror movies and disaster flicks.
Negative focus I renounce over-noticing & dwelling on what might be wrong with me or life around me. I will not minimize or discount my attributes. Right now, I notice, visualize and enumerate my accomplishments, talents and qualities, as well as the many gifts Life offers me, e.g., friends, nature, music, film, food, beauty, color, pets, etc.
Time Urgency I am not in danger. I do not need to rush. I will not hurry unless it is a true emergency. I am learning to enjoy doing my daily activities at a relaxed pace.
Disabling Performance Anxiety I reduce procrastination by reminding myself that I will not accept unfair criticism or perfectionist expectations from anyone. Even when afraid, I will defend myself from unfair criticism. I won’t let fear make my decisions.
Perseverating About Being Attacked Unless there are clear signs of danger, I will thought-stop my projection of past bully/critics onto others. The vast majority of my fellow human beings are peaceful people. I have legal authorities to aid in my protection if threatened by the few who aren’t. I invoke thoughts and images of my friends’ love and support.6”
//
“Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until, scant success forces him to retreat into the depression of a dissociative disorder, or launches him hyperactively into an incipient conduct disorder. Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child.”
Understanding where our inner perfectionism comes from and shrinking our inner critic seems to be some of the most important steps a person can take in learning to heal from a traumatic childhood. In the past few years, I have already engaged in some of the work necessary, including doing the cognitive work to understand what happened to me. Autistic people love to figure out a problem intellectually, don’t we? So, as you can see from this here newsletter, I have been studying healing from trauma. And slowly the information has trickled down from my brain into my body. I am slowly building up the muscles of self-worth and self-protection in ways that are very different from relying on my inner critic or endangerment (catastrophizing) to keep me safe.
This has been life-changing work for me. I am slowly recognizing my terrible thought loops I get stuck in are a product of internalizing the pain and suffering I experienced as a child in an emotionally unsafe household. It impacts me negatively much of the time—it doesn’t just happen with our dog—often, when I am having a sweet moment with Krispin I will be overwhelmed with panic/terror that he is going to die and leave me all alone. My children come to me with a problem they are experiencing and I am immediately thinking about their future and all the horrible things that could happen to them. I scroll on social media and see a post about wildfires in Maui or the lack of affordable housing for Gen Z or Trump shuffling around an Iowa fair and stirring up hatred and excitement, and my mind can be occupied for hours just marinating in all the ways our future is going to get worse and worse and worse.
I was exhausted living that way. And I am so glad I now can recognize all of these things as symptoms of CPTSD, and respond accordingly--including activating my fight response and telling the voice shaming me to go to hell. When I was a Christian, I was told to: Pray without ceasing, try harder, get more involved in justice work, stay informed, change hearts and minds, journal, make every thought conform to God’s will, rejoice always, study the scriptures for how to be better, give thanks for everything, never critique the overall religion and always honor your mother and father and never contradict their way of viewing both the world and your childhood.
It’s now depressingly easy to see how all the “help” I received in Christian frameworks did nothing to actually combat my inner critic and instead it baptized it as holy (literally the Holy Spirit sometimes) and urged me to ignore my body for the sake of protecting my family and white evangelicalism.
But I’m no longer in that space. Leaving Christianity was an important step for me to be able to identify where my harsh inner critic came from—my parents, but also Christianity. And not just white evangelicailsm—there are hallmarks of this kind of thinking in every branch of Christianity I have experienced. This doesn’t mean everyone will be as negatively impacted as me—but I also know I am not the only one for whom high control Christianity as a whole has been terrible for their mental health.
I will end this newsletter with the approaches Walker lays out for shrinking the inner critic. I feel bad that I am mostly just summarizing his work, but I find it so helpful and it is all on his website for free so hopefully it’s ok! And as more and more people talk about these issues I will be so happy to share their experiences and scholarship. Anyways, here are the top tips for those of us who have the inner critic and would like to start living life with a bit more mental space and a lot more joy:
1). Engage the inner critic with your fight response (yell NO! or muster all the energy you can to talk BACK to the negative thoughts when you notice them). After you have built up some skills in reclaiming your no/fight response you can then . . .
2). Learn to “embrace” the inner critic or deal with it in a logical, rational and compassionate way. But for people with CPTSD we must do the first part of engaging the suppressed fight response (and recognize our thoughts come from parental abuse/neglect or some other kind of long-term diffuse abuse/neglect to combat the toxic shame).
3). Thought substitution: Replace the negative thoughts about the world/yourself with positive thoughts. Personally, I have a really hard time with this so I try and engage in things that restore joy for me / hope for humanity when I can to try and build up those muscles when I am not actively triggered and this seems to help. Reading romance books has been great for this (reading about good things happening to people. Or even planning vacations / dreaming about them has been really helpful for me as a kind of therapy, because I am imagining a future where I am having fun. (So don’t you ever make fun of Disney adults who love to plan out trips, ok? We are just dealing with childhood trauma!)
4). Grieve. Doing the handwork of thinking about your childhood (when everything in you doesn’t want to do that!) and allowing yourself to grieve seems to be one of the most important steps in shrinking the inner critic. I have personally seen how this has helped, but it is so hard! Grieving is terrifying in its own way, but once the ball starts rolling it does get easier to process.
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Ok that’s all I have for today because ⅓ of the power is out in my house and we are in the middle of a heatwave here in Portland. (108 degrees today! In a city/house not built for heat!)
But I just want to end by saying: I am no longer a small child who is being actively conditioned to abandon themselfs and keep all unwanted emotions and opinions tucked safely out of sight. I can talk back to my mind, and interrupt it. I am learning to access my anger at my own trauma, and it feels profound. It is changing my life. I am no longer in spaces (mostly Christian) that required me to not interrogate my family or my religion or truly grieve what I experienced.
I still deal with the inner critic and the endangerment response, but it is getting markedly better. And I think the same can happen for you! I’d love to hear from you in the comments section: Do you have an inner critic? Do you identify with any of the 14 elements of perfectionism Pete Walker mentioned? Let us know!
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You know, the every day and random trauma of, I don’t know . . . almost dying twice in childbirth or witnessing not one, but two public suicides in your life? Life is traumatizing even without the long-term shit in childhood or in a high control environment, that’s for sure.
These rhetorical questions can never have a satisfactory answer; but I also don’t think we should have to push down our questions any longer. Let them linger. Notice them. Get curious about them. Don’t fear them.
This, and the rest of the quotes, are all from the same Pete Walker article and I highly recommend you read the entire thing!
Bless me. I was trying to figure out an unsolvable problem of how to make the religion my parents were obsessed with good news for me and for others.
I swear I am not trying to do a drive-by on the Enneagram! I think it has been helpful to people, but for me in particular it no longer resonates with me after discovering I was autistic and have CPTSD. And that’s just me, and how I related to it as a high-masking individual who saw it as a tool to MASK HARDER AND EVER BETTER. Many (most?) people probably don’t relate to the enneagram in the same way.
I love the idea of engaging the inner critic with our fight response; yelling NO! I actually wrote a poem about a similar idea recently:
I’m tired of defending myself
in my head from accusers
who have forgotten all about me
& that one offhand remark they made
among all the other offhand remarks
& society with its confusing expectations
& religion with its condemnation & salvation
from that condemnation
When here I am, now, autonomous
safe from the past
secure in a knowledge of myself
I no longer have to fight for.
But maybe the fight is clarifying
Maybe I need to hear myself say
again & again
the “no” that I could not say then.
I think this post just showed me even more ways where I battle perfectionism-which honestly is great! All 14 are things I do. I catch myself catastrophizing all the time. Recently learned how much I leaned into that as a way to keep me safe: ‘if I’m not constantly remembering the bad things that happened to me, I will fall prey to them again’.