For ages, I have been labeled and subsequently felt: weird, alienated, not fitting in, different, special, highly sensitive, asocial, introverted, from another planet, and the list goes on. At age 45, I discovered the world of trauma, and complex trauma or C-PTSD in particular. Thus far it never occurred to me that I was ‘traumatized’. Until my destructive behavior and toxic inner critic resulted in severely impaired self-regulation, impulse control, and emotional resilience. If I were to fit into one ‘label’, then it would definitely be that of complex trauma, as ‘complex’ is my middle name, I have been told.

The epiphany happened when reading the seminal work of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps The Score: “trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens” (p.92). I finally found the ‘evidence’ that it was not me, it was them! It was the entire world going crazy! Or was it me after all? On a physiological level, I felt relief, an unprecedented level of relaxation: in that very moment I did not feel rejected nor alienated…be it for a fraction of a second till my inner critic woke up.

C-PTSD and alienation?

By undergoing the tensions in our childhoods between authenticity and attachment, favoring attachment over authenticity at any cost, children start losing touch with their inner world in their subconscious efforts to survive. That emerging and growing disconnection creates a distorted view of the world (and ourselves) which makes us feel significantly more or less than the present moment requires, it disconnects us from many relationships and includes a sense of toxic shame about who we are. Eventually this psychological and physical dysregulation results in a separation, a rupture, a turning away from our authenticity, and leads to alienation.

Reading the work of Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk, Arielle Schwartz, Laurence Heller, and others… I came to see how trauma shaped my alienation narrative:

• During my pre-school years, being raised in a ‘golden cage’, I was overly protected by my mother and lacked any bonding with my emotionally unavailable father. Whereas dad could not genuinely take care of mom, somehow I started to take over that role, soothing the only person in the world where I felt safe. Clearly, attachment won over authenticity, and the process of having my developmental needs met, was arrested.
• At school, being bullied for being overweight and stammering, every single class was literally a nightmare, resulting in a hyper-search for ‘safe’ places where talking and physical activity were absent. As a consequence, I hated classes that my classmates loved (e.g. physical education) and loved activities that others hated (e.g. study time).
• Raised with the mantra “working hard is the only thing that matters”, I hyper-focused on and found ‘safety’ in studying, and rarely engaged in social activities during college. I was utterly unfamiliar with parties, pub hangouts, sports, and other common student activities. The recurring question “What the hell is wrong with me?” turned into an alienation process of my emotional and social life: my head was safety heaven and the world out there was a war zone. Dissociating was the default option.
• Once dissociated from my inner world and from the present moment, my sense of ‘being different’ grew exponentially, to the extent that – subconsciously – I enacted this reality by living and interpreting the world through emotional flashbacks. It does not come as a surprise that I started to fly obsessively from any perceived fear of rejection, and to thrive on the instant gratification of unreal expectations.
• This sense of alienation reached a climax when toxic shame and feeling like an imposter took the driver’s seat. Every glance (or lack thereof) directed towards me resulted in toxic inner critic attacks (‘there we go, people stare at the alien’) and an all-encompassing feeling of shame (wanting to become invisible or sink into the ground). I was E.T. wanting to go home.

This sense of alienation, despite its life-arresting outcomes, was the automatic ‘preferred’ option to suppress and escape the increasingly unbearable sense of rejection and weirdness. It is only recently, having been referred to Pete Walker’s “C-PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” by a psychiatrist, that I started to acknowledge the extent to which trauma ruled my life.

How a diagnostic label changes interpretation

Realizing the impact of CPTSD on your narrative creates awareness of trauma-induced automatic interpretations that shape our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. I did not realize how small I was thinking and feeling of myself until I built sufficient strength and understanding of complex trauma dynamics to face these utterly unpleasant sensations.

This continued ‘self’ awareness combined with an understanding of how C-PTSD impacts our lives, can shed light on how we interpret the world in which we live. Through the CPTSD lens, we start to realize how we create our very own world and how trauma manifests in nearly all areas of our life. This offers the potential to become aware that we did not create this alienation, rather, that feeling alienated is a mere consequence of suffering from complex trauma. It contains the potential to realize that not us, but our trauma, that caused that sense of alienation.

Some examples of how the C-PTSD ‘diagnosis’ (by which I mean the body of knowledge developed around the theme of complex trauma rather than the mere diagnosis) raised my awareness include:

• Whenever I am speaking and someone interrupts me, I feel rage surfacing. Looking at it from a C-PTSD perspective, I was having an emotional flashback of being laughed at when my vocal cords interrupted my voice when I stammered at school when I was denied self-expression because I did not dare to speak.
• My radar is always on while walking through the streets, scanning who’s looking at or talking about me. Clearly, nobody intentionally is, but my brain is hypervigilant for people laughing at me, reenacting the deep sense of feeling defective and judged by others.
• Loud people irritate me immensely, up to a point that they ruin my day. This does not come as a surprise anymore since I realized how the development of my self-expression was arrested in childhood and adolescence, to a point that it turned me into a socially anxious ‘human doing’.
• It took me roughly 2 years to feel comfortable showering at the gym after working out. Not because the showers didn’t suit my taste, but rather because I was ashamed to undress in front of other men, I felt so uncomfortable that I wanted to hide in my locker to escape the curses of the bullies.
• Unanswered read WhatsApp messages, unreturned calls, emails not immediately replied to, someone leaving at the time you arrive… banalities for many people, excellent reasons for my inner critic convincing me not being worth the attention of others, and being totally worthless.

Thriving in a gathering of aliens

Awareness of our trauma-induced narrowing interpretations and patterns enables us to change and take responsibility of our lives. Pivoting from surviving to thriving (Pete Walker), provides hope to outgrow this alienation process and heal our wounds and scars.

Reading, insights, associations, therapy, and day-to-day reflections have shed light on some important steps that I am taking interchangeably based on what I sense I need to ground in the present:

• Start to become aware of who you are and the journey that brought you to this very moment. After all, you’re a C-PTSD survivor, so you must at least have done something to survive. Feel what it feels like to be you. Understand how you think, feel, and behave in your specific way, both in an intellectual and physiological sense. Do it non-judgmentally. Do it with compassion.
• No matter whether you or anyone else is alien, start to befriend the aliens. Explore what your alien looks like, what (s)he likes to eat, drink, read, etc… Be pragmatic. Bring it down to earth and in the present moment. Catch your mind when it wanders down the memory lane, and bring it back to what you are doing.
• Discover that being different is not necessarily a bad thing. Your pain turned you into a unique human being. Your inner critic may relabel that as being alien, well, if that’s how the critic wants to call it, feel free at all times!
• Stop, pause, slow down, and just sit with your uncomfortable feelings and thoughts when they arise. They have the right to be there, they want to be heard, too. Listen to their message: what are they trying to tell me, if anything?
• Acknowledge that whatever you are doing to heal is extremely hard work. It may not feel that way, it may not look that way to yourself and others (who associates ‘feeling what is’ with hard work after all?), but rest assured: you are working hard so be kind to yourself (which takes effort too).

To paraphrase Ron Siegel in conversation with Gabor Maté: ‘ultimately, we have to be able to deal with the nitty-gritty challenges of being a human being living in their relationships in the world. And this ability to live the world’s nitty-gritty challenges – taking into account our idiosyncrasies, our inner functioning, and our authenticity – will eventually make us thrive as human beings.

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Alain Guiette

Alain Guiette, Ph.D. Professor of Managing & Organizing at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Currently taking time off in order to focus on the healing of my developmental trauma and to reconnect with myself. I survived an induced coma in September 2022, an event that I renamed to my “Awakening” as that is exactly how it feels like. My passion lies in developing a sense of critical reflexivity among your people, hence I love my job as Professor: “Education is not just filling a vase…it is lightening a flame”.