complextrauma

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.

#complextrauma #Trauma #Anxiety #MentalHealth #Depression #Migraine

I've been slacking on my somatic therapy lately because this guy thinks it's cuddle time. Whenever I roll out my yoga mat. He's a big boy, and as soon as I lie down, he drapes himself over me and basically pins me down. I may not be doing somatic therapy per se, but I'd argue the cuddling with my pupper here is equally good for healing the nervous system.
#ChronicPain #CPTSD #complextrauma

I call my inner critic Mrs. Rochester (from Jane Eyre) because she wants to burn it all down. After nearly two years of therapy and somatic experiencing, that cruel voice is finally fading. Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal helped me put so much into perspective. Not just about complex trauma, but about how the world perpetuates it. Humanity has an astonishing capacity to normalize the worst—look no further than how people in positions of leadership decided COVID didn't poll well, so now we're ignoring it at the peril of our own lives in a mass-disabling event. As we kick of Mental Health Month in May, I look back on the crisis that led to my CPTSD diagnosis two years ago, and how much progress I've made since then. Grateful for all the resources that helped me be more even-keeled, though I'm a work in progress. But finally, some of those old ghosts are finally moving on, and Mrs. Rochester is a lot quieter these days.

#CPTSD #complextrauma #PTSD #MentalHealth #ComplexPTSD #MentalHealthMonth #MentalHealthAwareness

This is the third time she has kicked me out after she insisted on me coming here.

Her husband has allowed me to stay both times. I don’t know what’s going to happen this time but I have to plan for the worst.

I need people to see what happens when you are disabled in the US.

I don’t know how much I can survive but this is truly unbelievable.

She doesn’t talk to me or look at me despite us being best friends for at least a decade and me staying in her home. She is completely unreachable in terms empathy.

She told me yesterday after months of literally treating me like I don’t exist: I think I need to explain myself
She proceeded to tell me all about how she used to take mental health days and have her house to herself and she didn’t realize the effect of having me in the house.
Then said in agony “I just need an end date to you being here.” (Gurrrrrl me too cuz I am pretty sure this is going to kill me if I don’t stop being the target of your resentment)
She then proceeded to tell me “I know you’re going to twist this in your head.” Ummmmmm excuse me? What am I going to twist? That you are kicking me out knowing I have no one else or where else to go? I don’t even talk to people so idk who she thinks I’m going to twist it to.
So I finally was able to say that. Then she told me “I know you think I’m gaslighting you.” Again… ummmmm what? What??? When I said that I have never said those things and that I have already been trying to strategize how to live in my car with the symptoms I experience and my 14 year old dog she was with me when I adopted, she responded “maybe that’s what you need to do.”
So I “need” to stay in my car because you need mental health days? Can I sign up for that perk? Cuz I could use some mental health days.
Also… does needing mental health days justify completely disregarding my long term safety and possible mortality?
(If you haven’t read previous posts… this is basically a saga of #complextrauma #DomesticAbuseSurvivors #Betrayaltrauma and what it’s like to try to survive on #DisabilityBenefits
I have contacted all of the people who are supposed to be there to help people in these situations multiple times. I am repeatedly told there isn’t anything that anyone can do.
Soooooooooo like… what do they advise as my next step? “Idk”
Okay that’s helpful.
The system is more than broken. And people who work in this system need to hear my story. Really hear it.
#ComplexPosttraumaticStressDisorder #CPTSD #ChronicMigraines #Migraine #Agoraphobia #PanicAttacks #Anxiety #ADHD #CheckInWithMe

It’s been 16 months since my CPTSD diagnosis and one year since I started somatic experiencing. It’s been a wild ride. As I shake the trauma out of my body with a combination of meditation, journaling, and bodywork, memories return that take me off guard—not the scary ones. I expect traumatic events to reappear in more detail, and they do, but it’s the bland everyday memories that weird me out. Suddenly I’m seeing random moments in vivid detail. Watching Mork & Mindy in the early ‘80s with my little brother—the walls were bright orange, there was an orange bean bag chair by the stereo where we played 8-track tapes and vinyl records. I can smell the incense my stepdad burned. I feel the terrycloth jumpsuit I was wearing. It was yellow with blue trim.

Then it jumps further back. Somewhere in the ‘70s, sitting on the ugly brown shag carpet in my grandparents’ living room, watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. The smell of cigarette smoke and the scotch my granddad loved. Our beagle puppy sits beside me. My uncle’s joking around with someone on the phone—the kind stuck to the wall with a long cord—anything you had to be said in front of everyone, so we all spoke in code when getting into mischief.

Then they disappear.

It’s unsettling sometimes when the memories are conjured up like this, even when they’re pleasant. I worry about all the years lost to dissociation and anxiety, all the wasted time spent worrying about whatever drama I was wrapped up in. This diagnosis didn’t exist back then. I tried to “learn to live with it,” as so many people told me.

2023 is the 50th anniversary of the chaos that eventually led to my CPTSD diagnosis. I love somatic therapy, but I’m often surprised at how little, innocuous memories or sensations can throw me off my game. Anyone else out there who’s felt this?

#CPTSD #PTSD #somatictherapy #Trauma #complextrauma

Over it

#Meme #ChronicIllness #ChronicPain #MakeMeLaugh #MentalHealth #RareDisease #PeripheralNeuropathy #EBV #Erythromelalgia #complextrauma #PTSD

Hello, I’m Angela and new to the group. Just wanted to share my story. Five years and four months ago, my 26 year old first born son took his life. That changed my life drastically. It changed who I am. I now suffer from complex trauma, anxiety, ptsd, depression and many other things I can’t even describe. I feel very alone a good portion of time even though I like being alone. Mostly, I am here to learn. I want to learn coping skills, etc. I also love to help others if I’m able.
#PTSD #Anxiety #complextrauma #Depression #Suicude #lossofchild #BereavedMothers #mothersofchildrenlosttosuicide
#SuicideSurvivor #SuicideLoss #SuicideLossSurvivor