What has your anger taught you?

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

When the System Signals Danger

Althea sat at her desk, staring at the email from her supervisor. “I’d like to discuss some concerns about the Henderson project.” Simple words. Routine, even. But in an instant, her entire system went into alarm. Her heart pounded against her ribs. Her vision narrowed into a tunnel. A cold wave swept through her body, leaving her fingers tingling and numb. Her breathing turned shallow and fast. It wasn’t a thought, exactly—more like a jolt of wordless certainty. Something primal and terrifying gripped her: she was in danger. Not physical danger, but something even more threatening. It felt like her very existence was under attack.

For the rest of the day, Althea moved through a fog of dread. The rational part of her knew it was probably just a standard check-in. But some younger, preverbal part of her was convinced it meant catastrophe—not just for her job, but for her worth. Her right to take up space. Her right to exist.

Across town, Koji experienced a similar internal collapse. At a neighborhood gathering, someone casually mentioned that his fence might be a few inches over the property line. The comment wasn’t unkind or accusatory. Still, something inside Koji crumbled. His face flushed hot. His throat constricted. For the rest of the evening, he felt both painfully exposed and disconnected—as if everyone could see some shameful truth about him he’d been trying to hide, even from himself.

Where others might see a harmless comment or a minor mistake, complex trauma survivors often experience something else entirely. These moments trigger existential shame—the bone-deep fear of being fundamentally unacceptable. Unworthy. Unlovable.

The Hidden Infection: Understanding Existential Shame

Unlike ordinary feelings of guilt (“I did something wrong”) or even general low self-esteem (“I’m not good enough”), existential shame cuts deeper. It’s the terrifying belief that “There is something inherently wrong with who I am at my core” and often, “I am irredeemable.” This isn’t just about feeling worthless—it’s about feeling wrong, defective, or inherently bad in a way that can never be fixed.

Think of your sense of self as a magnificent tree—designed to grow tall, reach for the light, and bear fruit. Existential shame is like a hidden fungus that enters the tree during its vulnerable sapling years. From the outside, the tree still grows and may even appear healthy to casual observers. But internally, this invisible infection has spread throughout the inner pathways where water and nutrients flow.

This hidden infection affects everything:

• How you process feedback and experiences (like nutrients in a tree)
• Your ability to reach your full potential (like a tree’s height and strength)
• Your contributions and creative expression (like a tree’s fruit)
• Your confidence and resilience (like the strength of a trunk and branches)

The tree continues to grow, but never as it was meant to—its very nature seems compromised from within.

Where Does This Core Belief Come From?

For survivors of childhood trauma, CPTSD, or narcissistic abuse, this belief often forms through:

1. Relentless criticism and impossible standards: When caregivers consistently focus on failures rather than efforts, children internalize the message that their worth depends on perfection. This is like the first entry point for the infection in the young tree.
2. Conditional love: Love and approval that’s only given when the child meets certain standards teaches them that they must earn acceptance through performance. The infection begins to spread.
3. Blame-shifting and scapegoating: When adults blame children for problems, conflicts, or their own emotional states (“You make me so angry!”), children learn to see themselves as the source of all problems. Even without explicit blame, a lack of reassurance that difficult situations are NOT the child’s fault can lead to silent self-blame, especially when combined with a lack of emotional attunement from caregivers. The infection extends further.
4. Emotional neglect: Sometimes the wound forms not from what was said, but what wasn’t—when emotions are ignored or dismissed, children learn their authentic feelings are unacceptable. The infection infiltrates the emotional centers.
5. Gaslighting and reality denial: When children’s perceptions and experiences are consistently invalidated (“That never happened” or “You’re too sensitive”), they learn to distrust their own reality and wonder if they’re fundamentally broken for experiencing the world as they do. The infection reaches the cognitive centers.

What makes this belief so devastatingly cruel is how deeply it becomes embedded in our nervous system and identity—typically before we have the cognitive abilities to question it. Left unaddressed, this core wound has the potential to derail a person’s entire life, coloring every experience and relationship through the lens of inescapable defectiveness.

How Existential Shame Shapes Our Lives

This deep doubt about whether we are fundamentally acceptable as a person doesn’t just cause occasional distress—it shapes our entire way of moving through the world, like how a hidden infection can alter every aspect of a tree’s development:

Perfectionism as Protection

For many, perfectionism becomes a survival strategy. The unconscious logic is clear: “If I can just be perfect, then maybe I’ll finally be acceptable or redeemable.” This provokes relentless self-improvement, workaholism, and exhausting vigilance against mistakes. This “trauma drive” can fuel remarkable achievements, with survivors becoming highly successful in their fields—all while unconsciously trying to outrun that core belief in their fundamental wrongness.

Just as some trees respond to stress by producing extra growth in other areas, this hypervigilance is the system’s attempt to compensate for perceived internal failings. For many survivors, perfection and achievement become not just a goal but a means of proving they deserve to exist.

The tragedy is that perfectionism can never deliver what we hope, because:

• Perfect performance is humanly impossible
• There is no amount of achievement that will offset such a deeply held belief
• Each inevitable failure re-confirms the core belief: “See? I knew I wasn’t okay.”
• Paradoxically, perfectionism often increases mistakes—exhaustion from relentless striving undermines the very competence we seek to prove.

Hypersensitivity to Rejection and Criticism

When you already secretly fear you’re fundamentally flawed and possibly irredeemable, even minor criticism can feel like confirmation of your worst fear. This creates a heightened vigilance for any signs of disapproval and can lead to:

• Catastrophic interpretations of neutral feedback
• Defensive reactions when feeling judged
• Rumination for days or weeks over a single comment
• Difficulty receiving constructive criticism even when delivered kindly
• Disproportionate panic responses to making mistakes

People-Pleasing and Fawning

Many trauma survivors develop a finely-tuned radar for others’ needs and moods, becoming experts at managing others’ emotions while neglecting their own. This isn’t just about avoiding conflict—it’s about continually seeking external validation that they are, indeed, acceptable.

The unconscious belief might be: “If everyone approves of me, maybe that means I’m okay after all.” This drives exhausting patterns of self-sacrifice, boundary violations, and emotional caregiving at one’s own expense.

The Collapse Response

For some, the weight of existential shame becomes too heavy to fight against. This can lead to:

• Giving up (“Why try when I’m fundamentally flawed anyway?”)
• Self-sabotage (unconsciously confirming the belief in one’s badness)
• Depression and loss of meaning
• Substance use to numb the painful core belief

Existential shame potentially brings dissociation—a sense of detaching from your body, feeling unreal, or going numb. This too is a protective response, designed to shield you from pain your nervous system feels too overwhelming to process.

Defensive Externalization

Some (not all) survivors manage existential shame by projecting it outward—becoming harshly judgmental of others, developing a false superiority, or even becoming abusive themselves. This defensive strategy temporarily relieves the pain by locating the “badness” in others instead of oneself.

This pattern, which can manifest in narcissistic traits, is often unconscious—a desperate attempt to escape unbearable shame. This isn’t an excuse for harmful behavior, but understanding that hurt people sometimes hurt people can be important for breaking intergenerational cycles. The difference lies in whether one takes responsibility for healing their core shame rather than continuing to project it onto others.

Recognizing the Pattern in Yourself

Many survivors have lived with this core belief for so long that they don’t recognize its presence or influence. Here are some questions that might help you identify if existential shame is operating in your life:

• Do you find yourself thinking, “If people really knew me, they wouldn’t like/love me”?
• When you make a mistake, does it feel like evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you? Or, do you have an unpleasant, visceral, physical response?
• Do you feel like you must be “on guard” constantly to prevent people from seeing your “true self”?
• Does criticism, even when constructive, send you into an emotional tailspin that seems disproportionate?
• Do you have difficulty accepting compliments or positive feedback?
• Do you find yourself longing for validation or reassurance from others?
• When conflicts arise, do you automatically fear that you might be in the wrong?
• Do you hold yourself to impossible standards that you would never expect from others?

If these questions resonate, you may be carrying the burden of existential shame. But please understand: this belief, no matter how deeply ingrained, is not the truth about who you are. (I know that statement might be hard to accept right now—that’s normal and expected. As you continue reading, we’ll explore how to begin loosening its grip.)

Understanding the Neurobiological Roots

Existential shame isn’t just a psychological belief—it actually changes how our brain and nervous system work in ways we can measure:

• When our mind wanders or we’re not focused on a specific task, our brain’s “thinking about ourselves” network becomes overactive in trauma survivors (this is called the “default mode network”). Instead of normal self-reflection, this network gets stuck in negative loops of self-criticism and dwelling on personal inadequacy. While we see this overactive self-focus in trauma survivors, it’s important to remember the brain is complex—this pattern doesn’t mean you’re broken, just that your system learned to scan for threats in a way that once helped you survive.
• Our brain’s alarm system (the amygdala and limbic system) becomes hypersensitive, treating even mild social cues as potential threats or rejection.
• Shame triggers a full-body stress response that can include tight muscles, shallow breathing, digestive problems, and difficulty thinking clearly.
• The connections in our brain that link thinking about ourselves with feeling pain become stronger each time they activate together. Eventually, simply focusing on yourself automatically triggers shame.

Understanding these brain changes helps us recognize that healing requires more than just changing our thoughts—it involves rewiring our entire mind-body system.

Read the rest of this article with steps toward healing is in the first book of Ellen’s “There’s A Word for That” series: https://a.co/d/00xlkvLa

Copyright Notice: This excerpt is from my book. All content is © 2025 Worldwide Groove Corporation. Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or use of this material without permission is prohibited. Thank you for respecting my work. 😊

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In mental health, trauma is trauma. What matters is not how an event appears to an outsider, but how it lodges in the body and nervous system of the person who endured it. If an experience overwhelms your ability to cope, it is trauma

My adult life was built on buried memories: a cruel, narcissistic mother, an uncaring alcoholic father, and a home ruled by chaos, neglect, and emotional abuse. I lived through beatings, emotional abuse, and neglect. There was little food because my father drank away his paycheck and, according to my mother, consorted with prostitutes. I was six years old and did not even know what that word meant. The air in our house was volatile. I learned to be invisible. Shouting was the spoken language, and vulgarity took the place of affection. Violence was not an exception; it was part of the atmosphere.

 When you grow up in an environment of disregard and danger, your brain adapts to survive. Mine learned hypervigilance. I learned to read the room, read my parents, and anticipate threats. The woods near our house became my refuge. Even at six years old, I roamed the hills alone because I dreaded going home.

 When I finally crossed that threshold in 2001 and began an eight-year healing journey with my psychiatrist, Dr. Dan, I had to confront not only the truth of my upbringing but also the chaos it was still creating in my adult life. It had taken two years of sinking deeper into darkness before I made the call to his office. I was consumed by depression and anger. My nights were filled with recurring nightmares—wars, tornadoes, floods, and, most hauntingly, dreams that returned me to the childhood home where danger still lived.

We often imagine therapy as quiet and orderly: a comfortable chair, gentle questions, and a swift revelation that fixes everything. My experience was different.

The room was inviting, but my heart pounded as I fought the urge to flee, terrified of being judged or berated yet again. During that first visit, after hearing only an overview of my life, Dr. Dan told me that healing could take years, given the depth and duration of my trauma. I was stunned. I interrupted him and said he had three visits to fix me. I was exhausted and wanted the pain to stop.

Yet amid the emotional havoc of that first visit, I experienced a breakthrough. As we talked, something carried me back to childhood. I was five years old again, hiding under our dining room table in the dark. After dinner, my father had gone back to the Polish drinking club a few blocks away. My mother, expecting him to come home drunk and furious, locked the doors, as she had done before. When he could not get back inside, he erupted. My parents screamed at each other while my father yelled for me to unlock the door, and my mother ordered us to leave it locked.

I was paralyzed with fear, crying and pleading with them both, trapped once again in the middle of their fight. Then my father smashed the glass in the door, unlocked it, and went after my mother in the kitchen—and the flashback ended.

Dr. Dan asked gently, “Where did you go?” It took me a few seconds to decide whether I would tell the truth. My instinct had always been to say I was fine, but I knew that if I wanted to heal, I had to open that door. I described the scene in detail, looked at him, and broke down in tears. I did not just cry; I sobbed with a force I had never allowed myself to feel. The trauma I had carried into that room was suddenly visible. There was no judgment, no hostility—only empathy. That was the power of the room I spent eight years in: it could hold the toxic pain I had suffered for most of my life.

Healing required me to stop protecting the people who had hurt me and start protecting the child I once was.

The stigma around family dysfunction is powerful; we are taught that loyalty means silence. For me, that silence was corrosive. Healing came through years of intense psychodynamic therapy, during which I relived traumatic events and uncovered others I had buried even deeper. For a long time, I feared I was losing my mind or developing schizophrenia like my older brother.

Again and again, I asked Dr. Dan whether what I was feeling was normal. His answer never changed: not normal, but typical of someone in my situation. Those four words gave me more than comfort. They gave me language—and language made healing possible.

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Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

The focus of my clinical practice is to help clients live fully and peacefully through adversity.

My clients have ranged in age from approximately 20 to 90, and they consist of parents, grandparents, sons, and daughters who are all trying to navigate estrangement.  Several clients have peaceful relationships with their adult sons and daughters, but they work with me to improve those bonds.  Although my observations are aimed at supporting estranged parents, they can apply to any difficult relationship.

Clinical Observation #4:  Is there a causal relationship between a parent’s PTSD/C-PTSD diagnosis and parental estrangement?

As of this writing, I am grieving the loss of my beloved 91-year-old mother.  As an estranged parent, funeral services were quite triggering in addition to being grief-ridden.  I was surrounded by those who loved my mother and by several who are estranged from me in addition to my adult son and daughter.  The ripple effect of estrangement was evident at the funeral and brought up a sense of betrayal in addition to triggering symptoms related to my most recent diagnoses of PTSD and C-PTSD. The sense of betrayal came from wondering who in this room I can trust, as it was obvious some people had chosen sides in my estrangement. For weeks after, I felt numb and out of touch with my body, a hallmark symptom of trauma. PTSD generally refers to trauma that is caused by a traumatic event.  Whereas C-PTSD results from too much or not enough of a behavior that impacts a child’s development.  For example, there is a major difference between a parent keeping a child safe and a parent being consistently hypervigilant. Ongoing unhealthy scrutiny by parents can lead to a sense of being smothered or controlled as the child grows into adulthood, possibly leading to estrangement.

Before my own diagnosis, I had already begun to see a pattern in my clinical practice. Most of my estranged parent-clients shared with me some degree of deep woundedness in childhood.  Several from that group presented themselves as being wounded in the form of trauma.  A significant number of my clients are both estranged parents and trauma survivors.  This dynamic prompted me to raise the question: Is there a causal relationship between a parent’s PTSD/C-PTSD diagnosis and parental estrangement?

How can I connect my trauma to how I raised my children?  Based on my clinical experience, there are layers to surviving trauma and surviving parental estrangement.  The first layer is self-awareness, during which you begin to recognize unhealthy behaviors that have become your trauma responses.  For me, yelling at my young children became a consistent reaction because that is how people often communicated in my family, and that was the only way I got heard as a child.  I also recently recognized that when I yelled at them, it felt like an out-of-body experience.  I simply could not stop myself. These behaviors were symptomatic of my trauma. The second layer is recognizing how the pattern of trauma responses played a role in your parenting. 

This realization is the function of the ESTRANGEMENT ALGORITHM®which I created and addressed in an earlier article. For example, yelling at my children became a daily occurrence, multiple times a day.  I believe my adult son and daughter would say they constantly walked on eggshells around me and my moods.  Another trauma response was my hypervigilance about who my children hung out with and where.  I recently made the following connection: My hypervigilant behavior is the result of being assaulted by a nonfamily member as a child, a traumatic event that recently emerged. It is evident that this layer requires one to let down their guard and crawl deep inside their nervous system to find all the ways in which trauma showed up in your parenting. 

The third layer requires seeking a diagnosis from a licensed therapist or clinician.  Receiving the diagnosis of PTSD and C-PTSD as an estranged parent provided me with a tremendous sense of relief on the one hand and a tremendous sense of remorse on the other hand.  Finally, my entire life made sense: my parenting, my relationships, my temperament, my moods, and other hiding places for trauma.  For my adult son and daughter, I feel tremendous sadness.  Though there were many good times, the times they may remember most are my unpredictability that left them feeling insignificant, unloved, and unsafe.

The fourth layer for me, which I cannot call the final layer at this time, is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), which I am currently undergoing.  The purpose of EMDR is to lessen the intensity of intrusive memories.  For a clinical explanation of EMDR, I refer to you other clinicians and psychologists who have written about it.  What I can share is my experience with EMDR, which should not be misconstrued as a recommendation. 

Over the period of several weeks, I shared in detail the various traumas with my clinician, which, at times, felt like reliving the incidents. My clinician selected one trauma to begin the actual eye movement, and she chose to begin with the most painful event, which was the assault. I am now approaching the end of the reprocessing phase for the most traumatic event.  I will continue EMDR focusing on both developmental trauma and other traumatic events one at a time.

I can say already that EMDR has helped me with the painful triggers, images and memories.  Before EMDR, my whole body would cringe with shame whenever the thoughts appeared.  At times, the thoughts were inescapable.  Now, I can think about the assault without holding onto the thought and while bringing self-compassion to it and to me.  I may address, in more detail,  my entire experience with EMDR in a future article. And I repeat, my discussion on EMDR is to share my experience.  It is not a recommendation.

As an estrangement clinician, I am not qualified to make diagnoses.  However, I am trained to see patterns and make connections for my clients, and several clients displayed symptoms that may be related to C-PTSD and/or PTSD.  A client’s trauma and estrangement journey are captured by the ESTRANGEMENT ALGORITHM®

To summarize, after my clients share their childhood wounds or traumas, they are asked to reflect on any related unhealthy dynamics when raising their children. These connections become the ESTRANGEMENT ALGORITHM® The parent then has priceless information which can inform their decision on whether they reach out to their adult son and/or daughter.  Just as significant is seeing and knowing these connections that can bring understanding to the client, and self-understanding helps to promote self-compassion. Both ingredients are essential for healing from the excruciating pain of being cut off by your son or daughter.

The Estrangement Algorithm® is ultimately a tool to bring estranged parents greater peace of mind and to answer the question: Is there a causal relationship between a parent’s PTSD/C-PTSD diagnosis and parental estrangement?

WORD OF CAUTION:

The ESTRANGEMENT ALGORITHM® is solely based on educated assumptions about why an adult son or daughter chooses to estrange. 

Only the estranged son or daughter holds this reliable information.

Life, Positive. “The Link between Trauma and Emotional Numbness: Causes, Symptoms, and               Recovery.” Positive Life Asia, 6 Sept. 2025, www.positivelifeasia.com/post/the-link-       between-trauma-and-emotional-numbness-causes-symptoms-and-recovery.                   Accessed 9 Apr. 2026.

“Undoing Emotional Numbing May Be Key to Trauma Recovery.” Psychology Today, 2024,                   www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/202405/undoing-emotional-   numbing-may-be-key-to-trauma-     recovery?msockid=0ab16c569c8a680527087ae09d486983. Accessed 9 Apr. 2026.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

A child can be loved and still be mishandled, fed and still be diminished, and protected from one danger while being trained to mistrust the instincts that might have kept them whole. Much of this damage accumulates without a single courtroom moment or obvious villain. Instead, it’s built through years of correction, dismissal, warning, sarcasm, comparison, discouragement, and adult anxiety presented as wisdom.

The child learns through repetition.

You are too sensitive.
You think too much.
You talk too much.
You want too much.
You are too confident.
You are too different.
You are embarrassing me.
You need to be realistic.
You need to stop acting like you know who you are.

Some adults say these things because they are afraid for the child. Some say them because the child’s clarity unsettles them. Some say them because they confuse obedience with health. Some say them because a child who shines in the wrong direction threatens the family script.

The child may have known something before the adults started spewing corrections. Not everything, of course – children need adults. They need protection, teaching, restraint, accountability, and reality, so romanticizing childhood helps nobody. Children can be impulsive, limited, misinformed, and vulnerable to fantasy in the way children are. A normal childhood carries a cost when adults intervene with various motives. Sometimes with love, sometimes panic, sometimes faith or hope, sometimes with social class fear, and sometimes with jealousy they would deny until their last breath.

Some children carry early signals that deserve care rather than automatic correction: temperament, sensitivity, curiosity, talent, moral discomfort, preference, dislike, a strange sense of calling, a refusal to accept what the family accepts, an ability to notice what nobody else wants named.

• Some know they are artists before anyone calls art impractical.
• Some children know they are mechanically gifted before school labels them inattentive.
• Some children know they are observant before adults call them nosy.
• Some children know they are leaders before someone turns that into bossiness.
• Some children know they are tender before someone teaches them to confuse tenderness with weakness.
• Some children know the household story is crooked before they have adult language for abuse, addiction, emotional neglect, or control.

Good guidance helps a child become more skillful without making the child ashamed of existing.

• A decent adult can tell a child they need practice without telling the child they are foolish for wanting the thing in the first place.
• A decent adult can say a choice has consequences without making the child afraid of wanting anything at all.
• A decent adult can correct conduct without attacking temperament, teach manners without demanding emotional erasure, and warn about the world without teaching the child that the safest life is the smallest one.

Control often borrows the language of guidance. It uses words like protection, discipline, humility, respect, faith, realism, tradition, family, maturity, and concern. Those words can be honorable, sure, but they can also serve as cover for adult fear.

• A parent who never chased their own work may call a child’s ambition unrealistic.
• A bitter adult may call confidence arrogance.
• A frightened adult may call curiosity dangerous.
• A rigid adult may call difference rebellion.
• A jealous adult may call a gifted child difficult because difficulty is easier to admit than envy.

The child may not understand the adult’s motive because children usually cannot audit adult psychology while they are busy surviving it. So, they adjust to the feedback, and learn which parts of themselves bring warmth and which parts bring tension into the room. That is how self-abandonment often begins… with tiny edits. Maybe it’s a little less honesty, a little less volume, a little less joy, a little less visible talent, a little less asking, a little less reaching, or a little less trust in their inner sense of self. After years of that, the adult survivor may call themselves lost and spend half a life searching for an identity that was never absent – it was buried under accommodation.

Adults often call their fear experience and sometimes experience deserves respect. A parent who has survived poverty, abuse, racism, exploitation, addiction, humiliation, violence, or institutional cruelty may carry warnings earned through pain. They may know hazards the child cannot yet understand and their caution may come from real injury, not cruelty. Even then, fear can deform the message.

• A parent afraid of failure may train a child to avoid risk entirely.
• A parent afraid of ridicule may teach a child to hide anything unusual.
• A parent afraid of poverty may mock creative work instead of teaching practical planning.
• A parent afraid of men, women, outsiders, authority, sexuality, religion, success, visibility, or independence may pass that fear down as if it were moral instruction.

The child receives the tone before the explanation. A warning can teach skill – and shame. It depends on whether the adult is helping the child carry reality or forcing the child to carry the adult’s unresolved alarm. This is where childhood injury can become hard to locate later. The adult survivor remembers being warned, corrected, restrained, talked down, talked over, redirected, and protected. They may also remember love, and that mix can make the injury feel disloyal. But love and injury have never required each other’s absence and families demonstrate that every day.

• The parent may have meant to protect the child from disappointment, but child learned to distrust desire.
• The teacher may have meant to enforce order, but the child learned attention was safer than expression.
• The church may have meant to teach humility, but the child learned confidence was sinful.
• The family may have meant to preserve respectability, but the child learned that truth had to be edited for public comfort.

In other words, intent belongs to the adult and impact lives in the child.

Adult jealousy toward children is ugly enough that people prefer softer the narrative: concern, personality conflict, different generations, miscommunication, discipline, the child was difficult, the parent was stressed. Some of that may be accurate but it still leaves out the uncomfortable truths.

• Some adults are threatened by a child’s aliveness.
• A child’s beauty can threaten an insecure mother.
• A child’s talent can irritate a father who gave up too early.
• A child’s intelligence can expose the limits of adults who need to remain superior.
• A child’s moral clarity can make a compromised family feel accused.
• A child’s confidence can offend adults who were trained to hate their own.

Children are not supposed to carry adult envy, but many do. They feel the room tighten when they succeed, learn to report good news carefully, become skilled at shrinking joy so nobody feels challenged by it, and  hide awards, sugarcoat opinions, sabotage themselves, or pretend not to care. They may become adults who instinctively lower their light around certain people before realizing they are doing it. This is not always conscious on the adult’s part but consciousness is not the only way harm travels. A jealous adult may genuinely believe they are humbling the child or preventing arrogance, fantasy, rebellion, or future pain. That only allows the adult to avoid the more humiliating possibility that the child had something the adult could not tolerate seeing.

A child develops self-trust through repeated confirmation that their perceptions, preferences, discomfort, and gifts are allowed to exist. Self-trust does not require adults to agree with every child impulse. It requires adults to treat the child’s inner life as real enough to engage, guide, and protect without ridicule. When that does not happen, the child may begin outsourcing reality. They look to the adult’s face before deciding whether their own reaction is acceptable. They wait for permission to like what they like, they laugh when something hurts because the room expects laughter, they say yes when the body says no, and they choose what brings approval, then later wonder why the achievement feels hollow.

In trauma therapy this often appears as a fractured relationship with preference. The adult survivor may struggle with simple questions:

• What do you want?
• What do you like?
• What feels safe?
• What feels wrong?
• What did you want before everyone told you what made sense?

Those questions can feel strangely threatening because preference once had consequences. Wanting created ridicule, disagreement created withdrawal, talent created pressure, sensitivity created contempt, confidence created correction, and refusal created punishment. The person may become highly skilled at reading others while remaining unfamiliar to themselves. That is the residue of living too long under other people’s edits.

A forensic dimension appears when adults repeatedly override a child’s evidence of their own life. Children may not understand motives, pathology, family systems, coercive control, addiction, or sexual boundary violations with clinical precision. They may still know when something feels wrong. They may know who changes when the door closes, they may know which adult is unsafe, they may know which praise has a hook in it, and they may know when the story being told to outsiders is false.

When adults repeatedly override that evidence, the child learns to distrust observation. They hear that they misunderstood, are exaggerating, that it never happened, that the person did not mean it, that they are being dramatic, that they should be grateful, or that they always make things about themselves. Over time the child may stop arguing with the adult and start arguing with themselves. That inner split can become one of the most damaging leftovers. The child – and later, adult version of themselves – sees something, feels something, knows something, and immediately cross-examines their own perception as if loyalty requires self-doubt. Adults who do this may think they are preserving family peace when they really may be preserving the adult version of events at the child’s expense. The cost shows up later as chronic indecision, over-explaining, excessive apology, difficulty choosing partners, tolerance of mistreatment, fear of being misread, and the strange loneliness of no longer knowing which part of the self to trust. A child talked out of themselves may become an adult who can document everyone else’s behavior but still needs permission to believe their own.

No survivor gets the original self back untouched. Time happened, adaptations happened, and loss happened. Some gifts went underground, some turned into symptoms, some became workarounds, and some were abandoned so long that reclaiming them feels awkward, even embarrassing. Recovery is not an attempt to become the child again. It is the work of sorting inheritance from identity.

• What did I choose?
• What was chosen for me?
• What did I surrender because it was wise?
• What did I surrender because someone was afraid?
• What did I call maturity because I had no room left for desire?
• What part of my personality began as protection?

Those questions require patience because the answers do not arrive grouped nicely together. The survivor may have to test small preferences before naming large ones, may have to notice envy, grief, relief, irritation, and longing without immediately making those feelings wrong, and they may have to revisit old interests without demanding that every lost gift become a career, a mission, or a redemption project.

Sometimes recovery looks almost unimpressive from the outside. Taking the class, wearing the make-up or clothing, saying the honest no, letting the laugh come out unedited, admitting dislike, and trying again at something once mocked. Saying, “I used to love this,” and allowing the sentence to sit there without apology. These acts can look small but they are often places where the original inner signal starts waking up.

At some stage the original adult voices become internal voices. The parent leaves the room, but the correction stays. The teacher is long gone, but the shame remains available. The family no longer has daily access, but the survivor keeps managing an invisible audience. That is how old control survives without supervision. The survivor may dismiss their own interest before anyone else can, they may call themselves ridiculous before someone else does, and they may avoid visibility, softness, ambition, faith, humor, grief, desire, or talent because the old messaging is still on repeat.

Some children were never confused in the way adults later claimed – they were interrupted, steered away from the music, the science, the animals, the writing, the machines, the ministry, the stage, the quiet, the sensitivity, the leadership, the questions, the no, the yes, and the strange little gift that made them feel alive before anyone taught them to be embarrassed by it. They became adults who could function, achieve, parent, serve, work, and survive while still carrying the old suspicion that their unedited self was somehow too much.

Finding the way back is usually a slow process, like removing one old mental soundbite at a time and asking whether it ever belonged to the survivor in the first place. Some people were not born lost – they were talked out of themselves, so the return to the authentic self begins when the adult survivor stops treating that old interruption as wisdom.

Sources 

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. W. W. Norton & Company.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Miller, A. (1997). The drama of the gifted child: The search for the true self (Rev. ed.). Basic Books.

Perry, B. D., & Szalavitz, M. (2006). The boy who was raised as a dog: And other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook. Basic Books.

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. International Universities Press.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

I recently had the great joy of connecting with Robyn Vogel. She is the author of the book Come Back to Love: A Path to Healing and host of the syndicated radio show of the same name! She has spent more than two decades helping individuals and couples heal emotional wounds, release shame, and experience deeper, safer, more fulfilling love–within themselves and in relationship.

You all are in for such a treat! Her work carries warmth, depth, and grounded wisdom, and I’m so glad to be sharing her here with you.

————-

RACHEL: What inspired you to start writing about and exploring this topic?

ROBYN: Healing from the death of my mom when I was 10 years old, and then losing my dad early and my partner at 40, led me to dive deeply into what it takes to HEAL and love again….to have the courage. How to keep opening my heart, even if I feel afraid.


RACHEL: What key insights or lessons have you learned through your experiences with this subject?

ROBYN: One of the most important lessons I’ve learned through Come Back to Love is that love doesn’t disappear because we’re broken or “too much;” it fades when our nervous system learns that closeness isn’t safe. Most people I work with are intelligent, self-aware, and deeply caring. They understand their patterns, have done years of personal growth, and yet still find themselves repeating the same dynamics in relationships. What I’ve learned is that insight alone isn’t enough. Real change happens when we work with the body, the heart, and the protective strategies that once kept us safe.

Come Back to Love taught me, and continues to teach me, that healing isn’t about forcing openness or trying harder. It means slowing down, building internal safety, and gently renegotiating our relationship with vulnerability.

When we do that, love doesn’t feel like a risk–it feels like home.

RACHEL:  What challenges do you think people face when dealing with this topic, and how can they overcome them?

ROBYN: One of the biggest challenges people face around love and intimacy is the gap between what they know and what they can actually live.

Many people understand their patterns intellectually. They can name their attachment style, see how their childhood or past relationships shaped them, and recognize what isn’t working. And yet, in real moments of closeness, conflict, or vulnerability, their system reacts before their insight can help.

Another challenge is that self-protection often masquerades as independence, strength, or emotional maturity. People may appear “together” on the outside while feeling guarded, lonely, or disconnected on the inside–and they don’t always realize how much armor they’re carrying until they try to let someone in.

There’s also deep shame around needing love at all. Many people believe they should be over it, healed by now, or able “to do it alone.” That shame can keep them stuck, cycling between longing and withdrawal.

People struggle because most approaches to healing focus on fixing rather than creating the safety required for real emotional change. Without that safety, the heart stays cautious–and love remains always just out of reach.


RACHEL: Are there any common myths or misunderstandings about this topic that you’d like to address?

ROBYN: One of the most common misconceptions about love and healing is that awareness alone should be enough to change our patterns. We often believe that once we “know better,” we should automatically “do better.”

When old reactions or attachments resurface, we judge themselves as failing. In truth, insight doesn’t regulate the nervous system–safety, attunement, and lived relational experiences do.

Another myth is that the right partner will make everything feel easy. Many people assume that healthy love won’t activate old wounds. Yet authentic intimacy often brings our unhealed parts to the surface–not because something is wrong, but because something is ready to be healed.

There’s also a widespread belief that needing support means you’re weak or not healed enough. This keeps people trying to fix relational wounds alone, even though most attachment injuries were created in a relationship, and are healed most effectively in a relationship.

Many people assume healing means eliminating fear, pain, or protective behaviors. In my work, healing isn’t about getting rid of parts of yourself. It’s about understanding them, softening toward them, and allowing your truest, most grounded self to lead–so love becomes a place of safety rather than survival.


RACHEL: What resources, tools, or next steps would you recommend for readers who want to dive deeper into this topic?

ROBYN: I recommend resources that support both insight and lived integration–tools that help people not only understand their patterns, but gently shift them in real time.

At the core of this work is my book, Come Back to Love: A Path to Healing, which offers a clear, compassionate framework for understanding why we repeat certain relationship patterns and how to change them. The book guides readers through my Four Gates Approach, blending Internal Family Systems (IFS), nervous system attunement, somatic awareness, and heart-centered reflection. Each chapter includes practical exercises and questions that invite readers into an experiential healing process, not just an intellectual one. 

I also have my program Ready for Love, which takes people on a journey from fear, anxiety, and a lack of confidence in love to knowing they are lovable and have the confidence to choose a healthy relationship going forward! You can learn more about that here: https://www.comebacktolove.com/heal-your-heart

Use the coupon code RACHEL500 at checkout to get a special discount!

Beyond the book, I often encourage practices that support nervous system regulation and self-connection–such as journaling, mindful embodiment, breath awareness, and relational reflection. I also recommend working with trauma-informed practitioners or communities where healing can happen safely in a relationship.

Ultimately, the most powerful “tool” is learning how to listen to your inner world with curiosity and compassion. When your system feels safe, love becomes something you can choose and sustain, rather than chase or endure.


—

What I really take from Robyn’s work is this reminder that love is not just something we learn to understand--it’s something we learn to feel safe enough to stay open to. There’s something so powerful in the way she brings it back to the nervous system and the body, not as a concept to master, but as an experience to slowly, gently rebuild.

So many people think they are “bad at relationships,” “too much,” or “not ready yet,” when what’s actually happening is their system is doing exactly what it learned to do to survive. Her work offers a compassionate reframe: nothing is broken, it’s all protective, and it can be met with care instead of shame.

I really appreciate how she brings people back to the idea that love is not something we force ourselves into. It’s something we return to when safety starts to grow again.

To love,

Rachel

P.S. If you’re ready to take the next step in healing from abuse and would like to explore enrolling in the Beyond Surviving program, start by applying for a Discover Your Genuine Self Session.

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

I recently had the great joy of connecting with Stacey Fitzgerald. She is a Certified Nutritionist, Somatic Breathwork Practitioner, Trauma-Informed horse trainer, Singer/Songwriter, Wife, Mother, and Creator of Becoming Safe–an online course and community for healing through all forms of betrayal trauma. 

As soon as we started talking, I just knew I had to introduce you to her. I even had the chance to attend her amazing breathwork workshop, which was soothing, healing, and eye-opening!

RACHEL: What inspired you to start writing about/exploring this topic?

STACEY: In February 2021, I had what I call my Breakdown/Breakthrough, which was a resurfacing of unhealed and undiagnosed Complex PTSD. I was so rocked in my body, especially because I had done a lot of study and had a reasonably deep head knowledge of what I thought it was to “be well.”

I realized, through my own experience, even though I had processed it in my mind, was still stored in my body and had been coming out through my songwriting for decades!

And it was showing itself through severe panic attacks and debilitating physical symptoms.

I began a deeper study of all things nervous system and trauma, adding to my head knowledge, and then really finding and DOING the things for my body that helped to move the needle from knowing to being.

RACHEL: What key insights or lessons have you learned through your experiences with this subject?

STACEY: One of the questions I heard posed early on from an expert I was listening to was, “When in life have you FELT SAFE?” I found myself feeling stunned–I wasn’t really sure what was meant by “safe,” and I was quite certain that I had never really felt that way!

A key insight from that point was how we needed to REGULATE our nervous system before we process trauma. I realized I had been processing in my head, but not regulating my body. Regulation before processing is key!

The other key insight has been that our nervous system is not our enemy, even when it feels like it is! It is actually doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is keep us alive, and alert us that it needs our attention. We are not broken, rather, we are functioning exactly as intended.

The missing piece was understanding the language of the nervous system, and how to listen and respond to it.

Our body knows the way home, and when we learn to listen, and become friends with our nervous system, the way back to our true self becomes much clearer.

RACHEL:  What might you tell someone who is just beginning to work on healing trauma?

STACEY: It’s easy to say, but perhaps the hardest to commit to: you just cannot give up.

No matter what life throws at you, no matter what kind of break you might take from your healing, and whatever trouble you might get into because of that break, you have to come back to pursuing personal joy and ultimate peace.

My experience is that overcoming trauma and abuse comes down to accepting that while it was bad and horrible and wrong,it did happen. I learned to accept that it happened withoutcondoning that it happened.

So, how does a person do that? I think that one’s addictions are the easiest place to begin because there’s a free, accessible process: 12-step programs. These days, many good books you’ll come in contact with while working the steps include addressing childhood trauma. The best one I’ve reads is called Iron Legacy by Dr. Donna J. Bevan-Lee.

If you want to learn about recovery through written exercises and reading personal essays, get Iron Legacy. If you want to learn about it via story, get my book!

RACHEL: What challenges or misconceptions do you think people face when dealing with this topic, and how can they overcome them?

STACEY: I think many people feel like something is “wrong” with them–that they are alone, crazy, and broken. This misconception can lead to utter hopelessness, depression, or anxiety, and can cause serious health issues among many other uncomfortable and debilitating effects.

Knowing that the answer is closer than they realize brings hope and a sense of security to someone who may have been feeling really lost for a long time.

Another challenge is that others in their life may not understand what they are going through, so their efforts to “help” can often be more harmful than supportive, and lead to further disconnect, loneliness, and confusion.

Connecting with a program, a person, or a community that gets them (someone who understands what they’re going through, and how to take steps back to feeling safe) can be a lifeline in a sea of chaos!

RACHEL: Are there any common myths or misunderstandings about this topic that you’d like to address?

STACEY: The word itself–SAFE–can have multiple meanings and implications. For instance, “playing it safe” can infer that someone is hiding or holding back. And feeling “unsafe” can mistakenly be attributed only to physically dangerous situations, circumstances, and people.

When I refer to BEING SAFE, I’m talking about a felt sense of being at home in your own body, able to be calm and alert at the same time, and having a nervous system that can handle the stresses of life and then return to a restful state when needed. It’s about having CHOICE and not being STUCK in patterns of disfunction.

When I say that you can BE SAFE, I use the letters as an acronym to describe how it feels: Secure & Stabile, Awake/Aware/Alive, Free from…and Free to… (fill in the blanks), and Expansive–able to grow, learn, explore, and step into the fullness of what it means to be YOU!

Now who doesn’t want to be SAFE when viewed in that light!?

RACHEL: What resources, tools, or next steps would you recommend for readers who want to dive deeper into this topic?

STACEY: I highly recommend learning about how your nervous system functions and what it’s doing for you. This means developing a regular practice of working with your body (physiology & nervous system), soul (mind/thought, emotions/feelings, will/choices), and spirit (your breath and connection to Breath/Spirit).

I offer an online course and community that contains all of that called Becoming Safe, as well as a rich resource section with connections to other people and sources like the work Rachel does.

I also offer a 90 Day daily somatic practice journey called “The Doing,” which is a great way to gently work with your nervous system and learn it’s language, developing a trusting friendship that serves you daily, as well as Somatic Breathwork Sessions designed to do the “deep” cleaning of clearing out what no longer serves us, and re-wiring into how we want to feel and show up.

Both of those offerings, as well as links to my Facebook pages and YouTube channels can be found on my website: onpurposeinternational.org

—

To your healing,

Rachel

P.S. If you’re ready to take the next step in healing from abuse and would like to explore enrolling in the Beyond Surviving program, start by applying for a Discover Your Genuine Self Session.

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer

For trauma survivors, that confusion can do real damage.

The body can be detoxed. The alcohol can leave the bloodstream. The pills can stop. The drug screen can turn clean. None of that, by itself, settles a nervous system shaped by fear, chaos, betrayal, chronic stress, or long exposure to emotional instability. If the substance had been muting panic, softening body memories, dulling grief, slowing intrusive thoughts, or creating a few hours of internal quiet, then taking it away may leave the survivor more exposed, not less.

That does not mean sobriety is the problem. It means the pain was there before the substance, and removing the substance does not remove the pain.

Not Every Survivor Numbs the Same Way

This part needs to be said plainly because people love crude formulas. Growing up around addiction does not sentence a child to become a drinker or a drug user. That is not how real human adaptation works. One person raised around 2 functioning alcoholics may grow up to drink heavily. Another may never become a drinker at all. Another may avoid every chemical escape route and build a life around control, overwork, hypervigilance, caretaking, food restriction, compulsive productivity, or emotional shutdown.

The injury field can be similar. The adaptation can look very different.

I have seen people flatten this into a lazy story about repetition, as if trauma always reproduces itself in the same visible form. It does not. Some survivors numb with substances. Some numb with performance. Some numb with distance. Some become so overcontrolled that they look stable from the outside while living in a near-constant state of internal bracing.

That is why survivor-centered writing has to stay accurate. Trauma does not produce one fixed behavioral outcome. It produces survival strategies. Addiction is one of them. It is not the only one.

What Detox Can Do

Detox has a place. In alcohol withdrawal and in withdrawal from certain sedatives, it can be medically necessary and sometimes lifesaving. The body has to be stabilized first. No serious clinician disputes that. But detox is not trauma treatment, and calling it treatment in the broad sense creates false expectations that many survivors later pay for.

Detox addresses acute physiological withdrawal. It manages the immediate medical event. It helps the body get through the short-range crisis. That is real work. It can lower danger. It can create a starting point. What it does not do is repair the nervous system, process trauma, treat attachment injury, resolve chronic shame, restore sleep architecture, or teach a survivor how to live without the thing that had been buffering reality.

A person can complete detox and still be in psychic free fall. That sentence should not shock anybody, yet families, institutions, and sometimes even treatment programs keep behaving as if a chemically cleared body should produce a settled life. It does not work that way.

What The Substance Was Doing

A substance usually acquires power because it is doing a job. Sometimes it is reducing social fear. Sometimes it is making sleep possible. Sometimes it is slowing body alarm. Sometimes it is muting grief. Sometimes it is producing enough numbness for a person to get through dinner, bedtime, a memory trigger, a night alone, or a work shift without falling apart.

That functional role is what many treatment conversations skip over.

If a survivor used alcohol to blunt hyperarousal, or opioids to mute both physical and emotional pain, or sedatives to stop internal overdrive, then simple abstinence language is too thin to carry the case. It asks the person to surrender the only tool that has been reliably changing their state without giving equal attention to what will replace it. That is not strength-building. That is exposure without cover.

The same logic applies to survivors who never become drinkers. The behavior can change while the function stays the same. A person may never touch alcohol and still live by rigid control because control is what quiets fear. Another may overfunction for everyone in the room because usefulness feels safer than need. Another may stay emotionally flat because intensity feels dangerous. Remove the adaptation before treating the underlying distress and the system often destabilizes.

Why The Return Happens

When people cycle through detox, rehab, relapse, detox, rehab, relapse, the usual language is refusal, denial, noncompliance, poor choices. Some of that language is lazy and some of it is dishonest. A lot of repeated treatment failure is a mismatch between the layer being treated and the layer actually driving the behavior.

If the body is stabilized but the survivor goes back to the same triggers, same relationship, same insomnia, same grief, same panic, same body memories, same housing instability, same court pressure, same loneliness, then the return to the old coping method is not mysterious. The original conditions are still intact. In many cases they are sharper because the chemical cover is gone.

Early sobriety can feel worse before it feels better. That is not proof that sobriety is harmful. It is often proof that untreated trauma has become more visible. Survivors can find themselves face to face with symptoms that had been chemically muffled for years. Sleep gets thinner. Fear gets louder. Shame gets more immediate. Old material comes back without sedation sitting on top of it.

This is where public judgment does its worst work. People see the return and assume the person wanted the substance more than healing. In many cases the more accurate reading is that the person had not yet been given a durable way to survive what sobriety exposed.

What Survivor-Centered Care Has To Reach

Care has to go below the behavior. It has to ask what the substance, compulsion, or control pattern was regulating. Then it has to treat that layer with something stronger than slogans.

For some survivors, that means medication for substance use disorder. For others, it means trauma-informed therapy paced slowly enough not to flood the system. It may mean treatment for PTSD, depression, panic, dissociation, chronic insomnia, or chronic pain. It may mean safer housing, better case management, distance from predatory relationships, and practical stabilization before deep trauma work. It may also mean naming that a survivor who never drank at all may still be living under the same old architecture of fear.

That last point belongs in the record. Survival adaptation should not be measured only by whether a person used a substance. Some survivors swallow pain with alcohol. Some swallow it with silence. The body can be cleared before the mind is ready. The symptom can stop before the injury is treated. Sobriety can be necessary and still feel brutal when it strips away the thing that had been managing the unbearable. That is where the real work starts. Not at the point where the substance is gone, but at the point where pain is still there.

Record note: ASAM states that alcohol withdrawal management alone is not an effective treatment for alcohol use disorder and should be part of initiating and engaging patients in ongoing care. SAMHSA reports that 21.2 million adults had co-occurring mental illness and substance use disorder in the 2024 NSDUH. NIDA notes that many people diagnosed with PTSD also have a substance use disorder, and NIAAA-supported literature warns against making broad assumptions about any specific child of an alcoholic based on family history alone.

Sources

American Society of Addiction Medicine. (2020). The ASAM clinical practice guideline on alcohol withdrawal management.

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. (n.d.). Understanding alcohol use disorder.

National Institute on Drug Abuse. (2024, February 6). Trauma and stress.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2025, December 22). Co-occurring disorders and other health conditions.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2025, July). Key substance use and mental health indicators in the United States: Results from the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: This guest post is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing shared here, across CPTSDfoundation.org, any CPTSD Foundation website, our associated communities, or our Social Media accounts, is intended to substitute for or supersede the professional advice and direction of your medical or mental health providers. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CPTSD Foundation. For further details, please review the following: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer