Topical for my recent blogs… This one comes from what I learned from Pete Walker’s writing on the Critic.
If our childhood was traumatic it is likely that the unprocessed pain may be projected onto other relationships. The chapter Shrinking Your Outer Critic in Pete Walker’s book on Complex PTSD makes for very enlightening reading. It is teaching me a lot both about how parents can dump their own rage over past injuries onto their children, scapegoating them and then ensuring that the child has to find ways to offload this pain. From my understanding it can either be internalised and then we get beat up by a savage inner critic or alternatively it can externalised and then we beat others up for supposed transgressions which may be unconscious reminders of things that happened to us in childhood that hurt us deeply and we could never really unpack.
As Pete explains, often we oscillate between the two positions. The cure he recommends and outlines in this chapter involves a combination of…
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Emerging From The Dark Night 