Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), also known as complex trauma, generally stems from enduring repeated traumatic events, frequently within a close relationship, over an extended period.
Unlike single-incident PTSD, complex trauma can lead to a range of psychological and emotional challenges manifesting additional symptoms, including impaired emotional regulation, altered consciousness states, distorted self-perception, and relationship difficulties.
These challenges can significantly impact your daily functioning, relationship dynamics, and overall wellbeing.
Causes of Complex Trauma
Causes may include physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, consistent neglect (especially in childhood), bullying, exposure to domestic violence, or living through intensely threatening circumstances (such as war, for example). However, complex trauma can also develop in adulthood due to ongoing mistreatment, such as domestic violence.
Childhood Abuse or Neglect: Physical, emotional, sexual abuse, neglect, or bullying can have a profound impact on a child’s development.
Witnessing Violence: Exposure to violence, such as domestic violence of parents in your childhood, or community violence, such as repeated fights at school growing up, or worse, can be traumatic.
Prolonged Exposure to Traumatic Events: People who are repeatedly exposed to traumatic events, such as war or natural disasters, may also develop complex trauma.
How to Recognize Complex Trauma
Psychological and Emotional Symptoms
Complex trauma often manifests through intense emotional experiences, including deeper shame, guilt, or feelings of alienation. You may experience altered states of consciousness, such as memory gaps in adulthood when trying to recall parts of childhood, or a sense of detachment from your emotions or physical self. To cope, you might avoid certain places, people, or experiences in general that trigger discomfort.
Complex trauma can also affect your psychological wellbeing. You may experience a persistent sense of worthlessness and shame, significantly affecting your self-perception and self-esteem. Emotional regulation can become really challenging with C-PTSD, leading to outbursts of anger or prolonged periods of sadness. It can also lead to phobias and fears that seem to be irrational, or anxiety that danger is lurking in places (or people) even when they aren't displaying actual signs of danger. These issues can significantly disrupt social interactions and daily functioning, limiting your life, making healing a complex (but essential) journey.
Physiological Symptoms
Complex trauma can also manifest physically. You may experience hyperarousal, feeling constantly on edge with heightened startle responses. Physical symptoms often include panic attacks, light-headedness, brain fog, fatigue, nausea, recurrent headaches and migraines, persistent muscular tension, gastrointestinal distress on a consistent basis, and more. These stress-related reactions can significantly impact your daily functioning and overall health.
Healing
Complex PTSD needs a mind-body therapy approach rooted in trauma healing. While this should involve some coping techniques, a trauma approach generally requires getting to know and work through what you are carrying on a deeper level in order to reduce and be able to shed the power these traumas have asserted over your emotional, psychological, and physiological wellbeing.
Other Coping Strategies
Self-Care
Self-care plays an important role in managing complex trauma symptoms and enhancing overall wellbeing. This includes anything from diet, to regular physical activity, such as walking, running, yoga, or swimming, for example. Physical activity generally helps to reduce stress, release tension, and help with mood regulation. Self-care also includes finding things that nurture you in other emotional ways, as well -- for some this can be reading, writing, art and other creative outlets, seeing friends, and anything else that's helpful for you.
Trauma Therapy
Remember, self-care is an essential part of healing, but it doesn't replace the deeper healing work that needs to be done. Often people try to use coping techniques to replace the deeper healing, and what eventually tends to happen is the deeper traumas that go unaddressed start to grow and take over, and can make it so the coping tools are no longer as effective. It's important in therapy to figure out the coping techniques that work for you, so you also have them available to you alongside the deeper explorative work.
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