Complex Trauma (C-PTSD)

People suffering from C-PTSD may feel that there is something fundamentally different about them that causes an experience of alienation from everyone else. Despite an abundance of self-awareness and resilience, people with C-PTSD often develop a belief that nothing will ever help them address the root of their suffering.

Symptoms:

- Hypervigilance: An overactive awareness to your surroundings, often scanning for potential threat to your own comfort.

- Disassociation: A disconnect between your mind and body, experienced as a suppression of any felt reaction to changes in your environment.

- Body Dysmorphia: A pre-occupation with aspects of your body that are believed to be undesirable.

- People Pleasing: Difficulty interacting with others without responding to them in ways that prioritise their needs over your own in order to reduce chances of conflict.

- Toxic Shame: An underlying emotional pain and pervasive emotional burden driving your motivation for protection from potential rejection, embarrassment or criticism.

- Inner critic: The automatic and continual inner response to judge your own actions, thoughts or feelings in a negative light.

- Emotional dysregulation: An experience of being stuck in an unrested state and either being unable or requiring a lot of work to experience complete relaxation.

Trauma is any experience that a person is not capable of processing/integrating/metabolising in a way that allows them to be more effective in dealing with related experiences in the future. Put simply, a person has been forced to adapt in order to survive difficult circumstances and now brings those automatic strategies into circumstances in which they are no longer suitable, making them harder to operate effectively within.

C-PTSD is the recognition that the types of experiences that can have traumatic effects to people is complexified by the diverse range of relational needs required over the course of a healthy human development. The reason these relational needs are capable of causing trauma is due to a child’s survival being dependent on the quality of the relationship to their caregiver(s) (Attachment Theory).