The key ideas

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

Pete Walker, 2013

Sometimes a short message from your boss turns a grown adult into a frightened child within a second. Psychotherapist Pete Walker calls this an emotional flashback and explains how a long childhood trauma can live in the body and the thoughts of an adult. A book about four ways of surviving, about the inner critic, and about slowly finding a way out.

Who it is for

For people who grew up in a harsh home and recognise in themselves a sudden shame, fear or habit of pleasing everyone, for their loved ones, and for anyone who wants to understand how childhood experience can echo in adult life.

If you keep getting stuck in a feeling of your own worthlessness and inadequacy, you may be in an emotional flashback.

About this book

An adult gets a short message from the boss: “Come see me.” But within a second something goes cold inside, the body tightens, and there is a feeling that he is small and about to be punished. The evening is ruined, although the talk turns out to be about something trivial.

Psychotherapist Pete Walker worked for many years with adults who grew up in families of constant cruelty or emotional neglect. He went through such a childhood himself, and through his own recovery. In the book he describes a condition he calls complex PTSD: the aftermath of a long trauma that a child could not escape. It entered the WHO's ICD-11 only after the book came out (adopted in 2019, in force since 2022).

One thing to know at once: this is a practical guide by a therapist, based on his work with clients and on his own life, not a collection of research. The book helps you understand yourself, but it does not diagnose you or your loved ones.

Idea 1. A flashback without pictures

The word “flashback” usually brings to mind a soldier who sees combat again. Walker's model has another kind, without pictures. A person suddenly falls into the feelings he had as a child: fear, shame, loneliness, anger or despair.

Walker calls this state an emotional flashback. In his description it can be brief or can drag on for a long time. And the person often does not recognise the past in it. Instead he takes it for the truth about the present: “something is wrong with me,” “I'm ruining everything again.”

One of the book's best-known ideas reads roughly like this: if you keep getting stuck in a feeling of your own worthlessness and inadequacy, you may be in an emotional flashback. But not every strong feeling is a flashback.

A partner is late and doesn't answer the phone. Half an hour later there is already panic and a sense of abandonment, like a child nobody came to collect.

In Walker's model, the strength of a reaction can hint at where it comes from. When a feeling does not fit the event, you can ask yourself which time it has come from. This is a way of observing yourself, not a way of pinning down the cause for certain.

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About the author

Pete Walker is an American psychotherapist from California who has worked for many years with adults who survived childhood trauma. He went through a hard childhood himself and writes about his own recovery. He coined the term “fawn” for the fourth reaction to threat.

All books by this author: Pete Walker

Terms from the book

  • Inner critic
  • Complex PTSD: The aftermath of a long trauma that a person could not escape, for example cruelty or neglect in childhood. It entered the WHO's ICD-11 classification only after the book came out (adopted in 2019, in force since 2022). Only a specialist can make this diagnosis.
  • Emotional flashback: The term Walker popularised: a sudden return to childhood feelings (fear, shame, despair) without clear memory-pictures.
  • 4F: Walker's own scheme, not a scientific diagnosis. It names four reactions to threat: fight, flee, freeze and fawn.
  • Outer critic: In Walker's model, the habit of looking for faults and threats in other people, which can get in the way of closeness.
  • Abandonment depression: The author's term for the emptiness and heaviness linked to emotional abandonment in childhood. An image from the book, not a separate medical diagnosis.

All terms

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