What is Complex Trauma and CPTSD?
Healing from Complex Trauma is Possible
Understanding Complex Trauma
Complex trauma often stems from repeated and ongoing abuse, neglect, or violence. Complex trauma can disrupt one’s sense of safety, self-worth, and ability to form healthy trusting relationships. Unlike some single-incident traumas, complex trauma affects multiple areas of a person’s life, leading to challenges such as emotion regulation difficulties, a distorted sense of self, and persistent feelings of helplessness. These effects can become especially severe when the trauma begins in childhood, because symptoms of traumatic stress can become internalized into our self-concept, and we may confuse them as aspects of our personality. Trauma can become intertwined with how we perceive of ourself as a person.
Complex-Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD)
Complex-PTSD is a term that describes the collection of symptoms that can result from complex trauma. Although it isn’t an official diagnosis in the DSM at this time it is widely recognized as a unique experience with significant differences from typical PTSD. The following are a list of mental health symptoms associated with CPTSD, but remember that every person is unique and will have their own presentation that may or may not include some or all of the following.
Recurrent and intrusive thoughts, memories, or dreams related to the traumatic events.
Flashbacks where the person feels or acts as if the traumatic events are happening again. In popular culture this is often represented as someone visually re-experiencing an event, but a flashback can be emotional such as feeling small and vulnerable when triggered despite being an adult now. It can also be behavioral where a person re-enacts aspects of their traumatic experience in the present.
Persistent avoidance of stimuli (people, places, conversations, activities, objects, situations) that remind the person of the trauma.
Negative alterations in cognition and mood associated with the traumatic events, which can include distorted blame of self or others, isolation from others, or persistent negative emotional states. For more on cognitive distortions related to trauma check out this blog.
Hyperarousal or hypervigilance, where a person is constantly in a state of activation, and on guard in case of threat. A person can have difficulty relaxing, and it may feel unsafe to slow down or be at rest.
Emotional dysregulation, which includes difficulty managing emotions, soothing one’s own emotions, or fluctuations between states of hyper and hypo-arousal. Emotions may be avoided entirely or feel intolerable and result in overwhelm.
Disturbances in self-perception in which a person sees themselves as worthlessness, bad, or experiences frequent and unhelpful guilt. In some cases the opposite can occur and a person can have an inflated self-concept and exhibit narcissistic attitudes or behaviors.
Difficulties in relationships, including codependency, difficulty with boundaries, or feeling detached from others, fear of intimacy, inability to trust others, and an inability to trust self to know who to trust.
Dissociation or feeling detached from oneself, which can include depersonalization or derealization.
Due to the complexity of CPSTD finding the right kind of help can be difficult, however it is treatable, and people can recover.