Pete Walker

I write this I recall the first emotional flashback I was ever able to identify, although I did not identify it until about ten years after it occurred.

A sense of feeling small, young, fragile, powerless and helpless is also commonly experienced in an emotional flashback, and all symptoms are typically overlaid with humiliating and crushing toxic shame.

Toxic Shame

Self-Abandonment

Abject feelings of loneliness and abandonment

Fragile Self-esteem

rather than as learned maladaptations to stress

Rage creates fear,

disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out,

Trauma occurs when attack or abandonment triggers a fight/flight response so intensely that the person cannot turn it off once the threat is over.

The Tao of Fully Feeling, which precedes it. The Tao of Fully Feeling is a companion to this book and elaborates many of the foundational principles of this book.