Complex PTSD – In A Nutshell

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is needed to describe the symptoms of long-term trauma. It is a psychological disorder that occurs as a result of repetitive prolonged trauma (chronic trauma) involving sustained abuse or abandonment by a caregiver or other interpersonal relationships with an uneven power dynamic. The impact of complex trauma is very different to a one time or short-lived trauma. The effect of repeated/ongoing trauma – caused by people – changes the brain, and also changes the survivor at a core level. It changes the way survivors view the world, other people and themselves in profound ways.

The Main Four Types of Symptoms are

Re-experiencing – This is where a person re-lives the event in the form of a nightmare, flashback or a sensation – such as a smell or a sensation on the skin.

Avoidance – Avoiding certain people, places or circumstances that remind you of the traumatic event.

Hyperarousal – Feeling that you are constantly aware of threats and feel quite jumpy/easily startled. This leads to angry outbursts and periods of irritability.

Emotional numbness – Some manage their feelings by trying to feel nothing at all – by becoming emotionally numb.

Other C-PTSD Symptoms Include

• Experiencing ongoing physical anxiety symptoms (“autostress”)
• Anxiety & Depression
• Living in a state of hypervigilance
• Experiencing intense and/or rapidly changing emotions
• Hyperarousal – shut down mode, wanting to curl up and die, avoidance of current circumstances
• Hyperarousal – being on edge, in fight mode, suppressing fear
• Problems with feeling and/or expressing emotions
• Difficulties in developing and maintaining relationships
• Feeling as though you’re inherently flawed or damaged
• Feeling as though you’re completely different from other people
• Having an unclear sense of identity
• Finding it difficult to trust others
• Experiencing fear of abandonment
• Problems with assertiveness, asking for help and saying no
• Problems with memory and concentration
• Sleep disturbances & nightmares
• Addiction problems
• Impulsive and/or risk-taking behaviors
• Experiencing derealisation and/or depersonalisation
• Problems with sensory processing
• Eating problems
• Struggling with parenting
• Experiencing hallucinations
• Self-harm, self-destructive and/or suicidal thoughts
• Emotional dysregulation
• Symptoms of migranes, chronic pain, autoimmune diseases

Life with C-PTSD is..

.. Having important or happy occasions ruined by anxiety, triggers, or dissociation.

.. Not always knowing what’s wrong, but feeling like something is and feeling unsafe in the world..

.. Feeling fundamentally different from others, and isolated because of what you went through.

.. Feeling so daunted by how much you have to heal that you idealize suicide or turn to other unhelpful coping skills.

.. Sometimes unbearable, out of our control, isolating, confusing, existentially exhausting, and deepky sad.

Complex Trauma Affects Three Key Areas of Life

1. Sense of self – positive or negative
2. Emotions – ability to regulate + self-soothe
3. Relationships – if + how you connect

Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.

C-PTSD is exhausting, painful, debilitating. Survivors endure ongoing toxic levels of stress, anxiety, endure emotional flashbacks, feel isolated, different to others, feel shame that is not theirs to feel. Compassion, patience and empathy are vital.

Complex Tauma Hypervigilance

Often when enduring prolonged abuse, the victim learns to assess and anticipate all.. moods, actions, words, behaviors, facial expressions, tone of voice etc., in order to stay safe.

This is hypervigilance – the continual need to work people out, in order to protect oneself from further harm, or reduce the harm coming.

This hypervigilance becomes a natural part of the survivors subconscious need and therefore continues on even when the harm and abuse has ceased.

Complex trauma hypervigilance is about far more than assessing physical environment.

Stages of Complex Trauma Healing

Stage 1 – Education, stabilization and safety = Education helps normalize doubts. A professional helps to work on the two goals of basic health needs and basic environment needs.

Stage 2 – Processing, remembering and mourning = Inner healing practitioner or counsekor works on going through all the traumatic memories and taking the incoherent pieces and working it into a more coherent whole.

Stage 3 – Meaning and reconnection = Inner healing is helpful in identifying faulty coping mechanisms and lies that were believed and dealing with existential questions.

Steps to Helping Support a Trauma-Survivor

• Listen with no judgement
• Validate and believe them
• Ask what more you can do to help
• Know where to point someone to for more help
• Keep an open heart and support them
• Care for yourself too

Types of Therapies for Trauma Survivors

• Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)
• Somatic Experiencing (SE)
• Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
• Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor (PBSP)
• Therapists trained in The Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM)
• Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)
• Tension, Stress and Trauma Release (TRE)

Healing with C-PTSD means we have to restructure and rebuild ourselves from scratch, with new thinking patterns we can start to feel better about ourselves – see what we are truly capable of and express our authentic self.

Trauma is not “someone hurt my feelings.” It’s a physical rewiring in the body that requires literal healing and rewiring – as literal as the healing required for a broken bone