What’s Complex Trauma (C-PTSD)?
Why do I people-please? Why do I go blank in conflict? Why do I feel responsible for ALL THE THINGS? Why do I overthink? Why do I overthink about overthinking?
And on a definitely, completely unrelated note… why am I so damn tired??
For many years, these questions circled in the back of my mind (and, every now and again, at the very annoying forefront). Sometimes, I’d admit defeat, resigned to the fact that this was just how I was. Other times, I went all in on fixing myself, forever trying (and failing) to understand what was so very wrong with me. Either way, the questions never seemed to stop. Until I learned about trauma.
Trauma is hot right now. Which is pretty f**ked up. But true nonetheless; a quick scroll through TikTok will serve you with endless content clips exploring attachment styles, trauma bonding, and (questionable) advice on healing. It’s even got its own hashtag, #TraumaTok. Yeesh. But, for the most part, I’m pretty pleased that it’s being acknowledged at all. Rewind ten years, and trauma was taboo. Now, we’re looking at it for what it is: a huge factor in our everyday lives, behaviors, and beliefs.
So let’s get into it…
When most people hear the word, trauma, they think of a single, dramatic event; something like a car accident, a natural disaster, a violent assault. Some people call this “shock trauma”. It’s acute and identifiable with a clear before and after. (If you’re curious to learn more about how to work with shock trauma, take a look at Peter Levine’s work). But there’s another kind of trauma; one that’s arguably more insidious. In her landmark book, Trauma and Recovery, Dr. Judith Herman explains the concept of “complex trauma” as something different: trauma that’s prolonged, repeated, and always relational. It doesn’t happen in a single moment. It happens inside the relationships you depended on most, and over a long period of time.
Complex trauma doesn’t always look like obvious abuse, and the effects rarely announce themselves as “Trauma” with a capital T, as Gabor Maté calls it. Societally, we tend to deem violence, sexual abuse, and other horrifying experiences as ‘worthy’ of being called ‘Trauma’, while dismissing or downplaying quieter, more chronic occurrences, such as emotional neglect, being repeatedly misunderstood, unpredictability, shame, walking on eggshells, or having to become the ‘easy’ or ‘helpful’ one way too early. But make no mistake; this is complex trauma in action. As neuroscientist Bruce Perry explains, it’s often not a single overwhelming event (i.e. ‘shock trauma’) but the cumulative pattern of relational experiences, especially early ones (i.e. ‘complex trauma’), that shapes how the developing brain and nervous system learn to respond to the world. In other words, you don’t have to have had a ‘newsworthy’ experience of trauma for it to be considered as such. Shock trauma - a single, specific occurrence - and complex trauma - prolonged, relational, and arguably less sensational (at least in the way that society defines it) are both valid experiences with the ability to massively influence our lives.
As a child, you couldn't leave when bad things were happening. You couldn’t fight back. And often, you couldn’t even make sense of what was happening because the person causing harm was also the person you completely relied on. That impossible bind gets wired into our nervous system, and it sticks to us like glue, leading us to behave in ways that leave us baffled, disappointed in ourselves, and frustrated. It leads us to asking questions like those above, aware of our unhealthy patterns, but seemingly unable to change them. Looking through the trauma lens has helped me to reshape those questions into something more compassionate, moving away from ‘what’s wrong with me?’ to ‘what happened to me? ‘And what did I have to do to survive that as a child?’
Complex trauma may show up as patterns that look like personality, or like something being wrong with you. They appear years later in how you respond to stress, how you see yourself, what your body feels like on an ordinary Tuesday.
Your boss sends a short, neutral email and you can’t sleep after reading it. Your partner goes quiet after dinner and you start over-explaining, or apologizing, or you shut down entirely. Someone gives you neutral feedback and what you hear is: you’re failing. These aren’t character flaws. They are adaptations — responses encoded in childhood to navigate an impossible situation. People-pleasing protected your connections with others. Perfectionism protected you against shame. Numbing out protected you from overwhelm. And hyper-independence protected you from disappointment or humiliation. They worked. And they were often the only options available.
Healing complex trauma, then, requires something different from processing a single event. Approaches like EMDR or talk therapy can be profoundly useful, but complex trauma, because it is relational and developmental in origin, often needs to be met relationally and in the body. Models like NARM (the Neuroaffective Relational Model), developed by Laurence Heller, work with both the nervous system and the relational patterns simultaneously, helping people reconnect with parts of themselves that had to go underground in order to survive. The goal isn’t to excavate the past endlessly. It’s to loosen the grip of the past on the present, so that the nervous system can begin to feel safe enough to respond to what’s actually happening now, rather than what happened then.
Trauma isn’t only about what happened to us. It’s about what happens inside us when we are confronted with an overwhelming situation and don’t have enough support, safety, or connection to process it properly.
The shift from “what’s wrong with me” to “what happened to me” matters to me both personally and professionally. I spent years moving between sociology and psychology before I stopped choosing between them. Sociology taught me that our biographies don’t unfold in a vacuum — that power, inequality, chronic stress, and structural conditions shape what becomes possible and what becomes normal. Psychology, and years of my own therapy and inner work, taught me something else: even when the world shaped us, we can still heal. We can reclaim agency. We can become more whole.
What I love about the trauma lens is that it holds both truths at once. Structure matters and agency matters. And in my experience, as people become more present and whole, it doesn’t only change their inner world; it changes how they show up in their relationships, their parenting, their workplaces. Healing becomes personal and relational. Sometimes even a little political. But above all, it becomes authentic. Real healing and real change.
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NARM is a highly recommended approach to processing and healing complex trauma. As a NARM Master therapist, I’m here to tell you that your experiences are valid, but your present and future doesn’t have to be dictated by them. If you’d like to learn more about NARM, click here, or drop me a line.