I understood the compassion behind that stance. But in over 40 years of practice, and more than 85,000 therapy sessions, that’s simply not been my experience. Every patient I’ve seen recover from complex PTSD and dissociative identity disorder has done so because they were brave enough to return to the unfinished traumas and horrors they’d been carrying since the original wounding. Their return wasn’t to relive them for their own sake — but to finally finish them.

The Mind Like the Stomach

My healing theory, which grew out of decades of clinical work, rests on five stages: Remember, Feel, Express, Release, Reframe. I call it the FRITZ, in tribute to Fritz Perls, the legendary psychotherapist who spent much of his career helping patients resolve what he called “unfinished business.”

Like Perls, I believe people come into treatment because they haven’t completed — haven’t digested — the traumatic material. And what hasn’t been digested repeats on you, the way undigested food does. The difference is that the stomach can only do this for 10 or 12 hours. The mind can do it for 80 years, or more.

This is why returning to those unfinished scenes matters so much. It allows a person to finally, appropriately, process what happened, how they felt at the time, how it has shaped them since, and what they can do now to put it away and find meaning in it. This is the work I describe in my most recent book, The Guided Imagery Cure, which features guided imagery as one technique for helping survivors gain closure on trauma and grief that has tormented them since the event itself.

One Story

A woman in her mid-50s came to see me for marital issues, chronic low-grade depression, and a drinking problem she’d never named as such. As therapy progressed, she uncovered repressed memories of being molested by her grandfather at age six — during visits meant to be the safest place in her world, with her maternal grandparents. She’d blocked out the memory of him coming to the attic where she slept. Once those memories surfaced, she needed to tell me every piece of that story before she could begin to heal.

That unfinished business led her to more: a date rape at 21 by a man later imprisoned for other sexual assaults. She needed to tell that story in full, and then we went further, using guided imagery in which I spoke his part, giving her the chance to hear him take responsibility for what he’d done. In the middle of that imagery, she opened her eyes and said to me, simply, “I want him to apologize to me.” Once she heard it, she was able to put that, too, away.

From there came other threads: being bullied by former friends in middle school, being left behind as an adult when she moved across the country to marry a fiancé who changed his mind, and years spent under a difficult and abusive boss. Every one of these unfinished stories needed to be processed one more time before she could finally live in the here and now.

Some stories only needed to be told out loud. Others required her to write letters she would never send. One required guided imagery. What they all had in common was the need to go back to what remained unfinished, and to actively finish it using the five steps of the FRITZ: remembering it, feeling it, expressing it, releasing it, and reframing it into something she could carry differently.

The results weren’t incidental. Her depression lifted completely. Soon after, she stopped drinking — and she remains sober to this day. She returns to treatment only when something new and difficult arises in life, such as the death of her stepson to a drug overdose. Aside from that, she is a healthy, grateful woman, recovered because of the work she did with what had gone undigested for decades.

Why This Matters

I understand the impulse to protect people from having to face their trauma twice. It comes from a caring place. But in my experience, protecting someone from revisiting the unfinished isn’t the same as protecting them from suffering — it often prolongs it. The trauma doesn’t stay quietly in the past simply because we decline to look at it. It repeats, in symptoms, in relationships, in the body, in the bottle.

It’s our job as clinicians to help our patients go back to what hasn’t been appropriately digested — carefully, with skill, and with a clear structure for doing so — so they can finally process what happened, how it felt, how it shaped them, and what meaning they can now make of it. That’s how unfinished business becomes finished. That’s how survivors of complex trauma stop carrying the past as though it was still happening and start living in the here and now.

* * *
Dr. Christopher Cortman has facilitated over 80,000 hours of psychotherapy during his distinguished career spanning more than four decades. A Florida Licensed Psychologist since 1985, he maintains a thriving private practice while specializing in emotional trauma and anxiety disorders. He’s appeared nationwide on talk radio and television. The acclaimed author of four previous books, his new book, The Guided Imagery Cure: The Best Proven Methods for Quickly Resolving and Healing Trauma, describes a profoundly impactful tool for addressing trauma, grief, and more. Learn more at srqshrink.com.

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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

Just the other night, I arrived at the edge of the driveway to pick up my 16-year-old son from his dad’s house. Now mind you, I say “dad’s house,” but we are not yet divorced so it’s technically the marital home because I’m on the deed and mortgage. It was exactly 7pm because that’s what the court order defined as my pickup time and I’m a girl who knows how to follow the rules. 

I waited. No sign of my son.

I adjusted my weathered grey bucket hat and smoothed out my custom designed t-shirt that my daughter created for me several years back when we were all still pretending to be a happy family: navy blue with a light blue heart over my chest and a Leigh Hunt quote on the back saying “The groundwork for all happiness is good health.”

After the longest five minutes of my life, my son marched down the front walk of the house I can’t get into followed by my daughter who is in college now. As the parent who left, they’ve come to perceive me as the bad parent even though I’ve been operating in the shadows to protect them: most recently, I prevented an unnecessary knee surgery that my ex was pushing on my son.

Yet, all I saw were deadened faces. Solemn shuffles. The essence of their personalities absent. As they approached, my daughter had her phone up videoing the whole event. 

A year ago, I hired a bankruptcy lawyer. Five months ago, the court ordered appropriate support payments and confirmed our 50-50 parenting plan. Then, the dam broke: It felt as though my estranged spouse claimed my son didn’t want to see me and stopped allowing pickups. More court battles began. That night, I sat at the driveway’s edge with another order defining pickup times, drop-off times, and my extra weeknight dinner on off weeks. 

Those ghost-like versions of my children curdled my stomach.

I rolled down the window to greet them. The cool breeze reminded me to take a deep breath. 

You’re okay. You got this.

Ever since I filed a police report against my spouse and left the marital home, I struggled with picking up my son. The bodily sensations that arose when I was anywhere near that home were almost too much. I’d been through numerous EMDR sessions and desensitization trainings with my therapist to execute what I politely called the “extraction.”

Now, not only did I have to deal with my potential dysregulation, but the forms approaching my car were not the children I’d raised to be loving and warm, compassionate and caring, absolutely extraordinary human beings. 

My handsome, athletic, strong of heart and strong of mind son stood back from my window, crossed his arms, and stated for the camera that I was “manipulative” and he was “scared.”

After I left my marriage, and started healing from my symptoms of C-PTSD, my dad said to me, “I didn’t know where you went, but I’m glad to have you back.” At the time, that sentence struck me: I hadn’t gone anywhere. What did he mean?

Over the past few years, I’ve realized that when you are undergoing subtle emotional abuse, you don’t know it’s happening. You are ever so slowly changing to the outside world, but only the people closest to you who have known you your whole life can perceive the change.  

I can tell you now that I felt my true self drifting away throughout my marriage and some other self replacing it. There was a darkness taking over my thoughts that I didn’t understand. I couldn’t share that darkness with the world, so my whole life became an act. 

I understand now that emotional manipulation rewires the brain. For me, it felt like white turned into black. Happy into sad. Good into bad. It even turned a happy, optimistic person determined to do good work in the world into someone suicidal. But that wasn’t the real me. That was an irrational thought. That was my rewired brain talking and I had to undo the rewiring.

C-PTSD deeply impacts your ability to interact with people since it often results from an extremely close relationship, someone you trusted. As you heal, your behavior is strange and you’re processing a lot of anger. You need people in your life who will still love you, even when they don’t understand why this happy-go-lucky person is now so embittered.

Luckily …

• I had a few close childhood friends ready to help me heal. I needed to reboot my real self, and they had the original source code.
• My parents came to my aid as well in the greatest display of unconditional love I’ve ever known.
• And my therapist, the woman who put the right label on my mental malaise, we’ve done critical work together to bring my psyche from a place of believing I was bad, broken, and unlovable, all the way back to better. 

My healing journey also included trauma-focused yoga, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and a lot of natural supplements, journaling, reading and reflecting. My brain doctor was thrilled with my last set of SPECT scans. She’d seen thousands and she described the healing I’d achieved in only one year, “incredible.”

Now, I know I’ve rewired my brain back.

A loving marriage would never cause C-PTSD.

I’ve made peace with that. I am also proud of the work I’ve done to bring myself back. If you can believe it, I am grateful for what I have been through. The sun shines brighter. The air smells sweeter. Every moment is more precious than ever.

I have a dedicated therapist who promised me we’d discover the root cause of my mental health mess, and we did. I have the best relationship I’ve ever had with my parents: a deeper, more meaningful connection than ever before. And, I know who my real friends are because they did not judge the person I appeared to be on the outside when I was suffering the most, they remembered who I was on the inside, and they helped me find her again.

Now it’s my turn to help.

Seeing my kids that way the other night meant that I am now healed enough to see C-PTSD in other people, but it also means that my children need to heal now too. I’m ready to be a therapist, a parent, and a good friend all wrapped into one.

I am the only one who has loved them unconditionally through spilled milk, temper tantrums, car accidents, and more. I am the only one who has observed them closely—with empathy and curiosity—and quietly questioned and actively listened to understand how they think, who they are, and where they want to go in life.

I am the only hope my children have of reclaiming their real selves and it’s time to turn the tide. 

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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 word “mother” belongs in this title because the novel centers on Corrine Dollanganger, and because maternal betrayal has its own wound. But the danger is not limited to mothers because fathers, adoptive parents, stepparents, grandparents, guardians, and other caregivers can become the person a child has no power to escape from. The deeper part of this is what happens when the adult assigned to protect the child becomes the source of threat, abandonment, or calculated harm.

Recently, I watched the screen version on Netflix and understood why the story had bothered me for so long. I was no longer a young reader who felt sickened by the plot. I had lived through my own childhood, raised children of my own, and spent years as a trauma therapist working with people who had been harmed by the adults who should have protected them.

Dangerous parents are not rare in this line of work. They were not always easy to spot, and they did not all look like monsters. Some look respectable, some are charming, some religious, some highly educated, while many were wounded people who turned their damage into household law.

In all its gothic excess, Flowers in the Attic gets that part right. The most frightening parent is not always the one who rages in the open. Sometimes it is the one who makes a decision, explains it as temporary, asks the children to trust, then keeps moving the line until betrayal becomes the family routine. In the screen version, Corrine does not walk in as a murderer. She arrives as a widowed mother in distress, returning to Foxworth Hall after her husband’s death because her father is dying and the money is there. Her children are living evidence of the marriage her father condemned as incestuous.

If they are discovered, they threaten the inheritance, the social recovery, and the new life she wants to buy her way back into. At first, she speaks in the language of necessity–the children must stay hidden for a little while, their grandfather must be managed, and their grandmother must be endured. Better days are coming – she will return, she will fix it, and she will save them. Those are the promises that kept her abused children waiting.

Corrine is psychologically useful because she is not written as a woman who begins with open violence. She begins with concealment, excuse, delay, and self-pity. The children are first treated as temporary complications and then little by little, they become liabilities and witnesses. By the time poison enters the story, the emotional crime has already been underway for a long time.

The horror grows because the children still believe in her. They are hungry, isolated, frightened, and dependent, but they keep measuring time by their mother’s visits. That is how children are built–they search for the protector even after the protector has begun to fail them. They excuse the absence, reinterpret the neglect, and hold on to any small performance of care because letting go of the parent can feel more dangerous than believing the lie.

Corrine’s slide is ugly, but it can be followed. She wants money, youth, admiration, romance, and distance from the shame attached to her first marriage. Her children begin as loved dependents, or at least children she can still imagine herself loving. Over time, they become reminders, obstacles, witnesses, and financial threats. Once she wants a new life badly enough, she stops treating them as children with claims on her conscience. The poisoning enters after the children have already been reduced in her mind.

Poisoning is not the sudden loss of temper. It is not the slap, the scream, or the impulsive strike that abusive adults later excuse as stress. Poisoning requires time, concealment, repetition, and enough emotional distance to let the victim keep eating from the hand that is harming them. In Flowers in the Attic, the poisoned doughnuts are grotesque because they arrive through the ritual of feeding. Thus, the mother’s role is turned inside out. Food, the most basic sign of care, becomes the delivery system for death. That choice says more about Corrine than any speech she gives. She does not want to face the full reality of killing her children directly. She wants disappearance without confrontation, benefit without exposure, and a crime that can hide behind illness, weakness, and delay. The children are already locked away and poison completes what captivity began.

For survivors, this is why the book can feel sickening even when the plot is extreme. The surface story may be sensational, but the emotional math is familiar to many people raised by unsafe adults. A parent wants something, a child interferes, and the parent begins to treat the child’s need as an accusation. The child’s hunger becomes irritating, the child’s fear becomes inconvenient, and the child’s memory becomes dangerous. 

Children in unsafe homes are often forced to carry adult secrets. They are expected to protect the parent’s image, absorb the parent’s mood, forgive the parent’s outburst, and keep family business inside the family. When the adult is charming in public, the child learns another injury: the world may like the person who scares you the most.

That is part of complex trauma. The injury is not only the event–it is the captivity inside the relationship. The child cannot simply leave, cannot negotiate as an equal, cannot demand accountability, and cannot make the adult become safe through obedience. The child keeps trying anyway because dependence leaves few options. The nervous system learns to scan, appease, freeze, hide, perform, and wait.

During my years as a trauma therapist, I learned how long that training can last. Adult survivors can still read a room faster than other people. They can detect mood shifts, silence changes, footsteps, pauses, facial tension, and small changes in tone. Many have trouble naming their childhood as abusive because there had been decent days too. They might say it was not daily, or home life was confusing, or not as bad as someone else’s story. That kind of measuring is common among survivors who were trained to doubt their own memory of pain. I understand that careful language because I have used it myself.

My parents were not abusive every minute or every day and I came to terms with that decades ago. Yet, the child in an unsafe home often leans into softer terms before anyone else can dismiss it.

Flowers in the Attic deserves a more adult reading, as it is far deeper than just shock fiction. Corrine is not merely a bad mother in a lurid plot–she is a fictional study in what happens when a caregiver chooses self-protection over the child with increasing comfort. The grandmother’s cruelty supplies the religious punishment, the locked room supplies the captivity, and Corrine supplies the betrayal that makes the story land. The children keep waiting for rescue from the person who is arranging their erasure.

he book also exposes a painful reality about family systems: danger inside a home often continues because people rename or minimize it. Control becomes discipline, isolation becomes protection, silence becomes loyalty, fear becomes respect, neglect becomes sacrifice, and the child is told to wait, trust, obey, understand, forgive, and stay quiet while adults work out adult concerns at the child’s expense.

A child should never be asked to understand why the adult cannot protect them. And, while that may sound too simple for a story as gothic as Flowers in the Attic, it is the clinical and moral center of the act. Children can survive hardship when the caregiver remains protective. They can survive poverty, grief, illness, relocation, divorce, and fear when at least one adult stands between them and the threat.

The wound changes when the caregiver becomes the threat or knowingly leaves the child alone with it. That was the piece I could not have explained when I read the book in the 1970s. I was horrified because some part of me already understood unsafe caregiving, even though my own life did not resemble the novel’s extremes. Later, as a mother, the story took on another meaning. I knew what I would not become, and I knew my children would not have to live under my wounds as if those wounds were their inheritance.

In fact, I recently wrote Born to Burn which talks about that inheritance and how it reveals itself in the world. When survivors catch the inherited reflex before it reaches the child, they stop the sentence, leave the room, apologize, and protect the child from the person they were once taught to become. That does not make survivors perfect parents: it makes them accountable ones.

Sources 

Andrews, V. C. (1979). Flowers in the Attic. Pocket Books.

Courtois, C. A., & Ford, J. D. (Eds.). (2009). Treating complex traumatic stress disorders: An evidence-based guide. Guilford Press.

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

World Health Organization. (2019). International classification of diseases for mortality and morbidity statistics (11th ed.).

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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

What are you learning to be more patient with?

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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

Where are you practicing taking up more space?

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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 room may go quiet, they may nervously laugh, deflect, look uncomfortable, make a joke, or reach for traits that sound useful instead of personal.

Reliable. Hardworking. Good in a crisis. Loyal. Helpful.

The answers often sound less like self-recognition and more like a job reference written under stress.

Ask for five (5) negative things, and the list can arrive with almost no delay.

Too sensitive. Too intense. Too much. Too emotional. Too needy. Too guarded. Too weird. Too damaged. Too angry. Too quiet. Too loud. Too hard to love. Too hard to understand. Too late to become anything else.

Sit with that a minute. That imbalance tells a story many survivors already know in their bones. Criticism became fluent long before self-respect had a chance to form its own language.

Some people call this low self-esteem, which is accurate enough for a screening form but far too thin for lived experience. Low self-esteem sounds like a personal confidence problem. For many trauma survivors, the injury runs deeper than confidence – it sits in the way a person learned to describe themselves, assess themselves, explain themselves, and stand trial inside their own mind before anyone else even enters the room.

Negative self-talk rarely begins as self-talk – it begins as somebody else’s voice.

The First Narrator Was Usually External

Children borrow language before they own it. They borrow words for their bodies, moods, talents, failures, behavior, worth, and their place in the family. A child called dramatic enough times may begin to doubt every strong feeling. A child called lazy may stop noticing exhaustion, depression, boredom, sensory overload, or lack of support. A child called selfish may become afraid of preference. A child called difficult may begin translating every need into an accusation against themselves.

Children can be corrected without being injured because they need correction. They also need adults who can say no, set limits, demand accountability, teach repair, and tell them when their conduct harms someone else. The problems occur when correction becomes the child’s identity.

• You made a mistake becomes you are careless.
• You are upset becomes you are unstable.
• You need attention becomes you are manipulative.
• You disagree becomes you are disrespectful.
• You are sensitive becomes you are weak.
• You are different becomes you are embarrassing.

A child may resist at first – they may argue, cry, explain, or try to prove the adult wrong. Over time, resistance can cost too much so the child learns the family’s preferred vocabulary as the outside critic moves indoors. That is how a survivor can become an adult who no longer needs anyone in the room to feel accused of something.

Negativity Can Feel Like Accuracy

One reason negative self-talk survives so long is that it can feel honest. A survivor may distrust compliments because praise feels vague, sentimental, unsafe, or manipulative. Criticism feels sharper – more familiar, more serious – almost professional in its certainty. If the mind has spent years rehearsing self-attack, kindness can feel like bad data.

Tell a survivor, “You are resilient,” and the reply may come back fast: “I just had no choice.”

Tell them, “You are talented,” and they may begin listing everything they failed to finish.

Tell them, “You are lovable,” and they may remember the people who left, those who harmed them, or the people who stayed but treated closeness like a chore.

The mind trained by trauma often searches for the exception to any good statement. It cross-examines hope, and demands a file full of evidence before allowing one decent sentence about the self to stand.

Negative claims face far less review, which is one of the quiet distortions of complex trauma. The survivor may believe they are being fair because they are being harsh, and they may confuse self-attack with realism because excessive kindness once came with a hook. Criticism came with history.

For some survivors, saying something good about themselves feels like lying yet saying something cruel about themselves feels like remembering.

Praise Can Trigger Suspicion, Debt, or Shame

Positive self-description can be uncomfortable for reasons that have little to do with vanity. In some homes, children learned that being proud invited punishment. Confidence was called arrogance, joy was called showing off or attention-seeking, talent became a family inconvenience, beauty brought resentment, intelligence brought ridicule, sensitivity brought contempt, and ambition made adults nervous because ambition threatens every room built on resignation.

In other homes, praise was conditional. A child was valued when they performed, obeyed, pleased, achieved, stayed quiet, made the family look good, or took care of an adult’s emotions. Praise became less about the child’s self and more about usefulness.

Both leave a mark.

An adult survivor may struggle to name positive traits because positive traits never felt safely theirs. Being good at something may mean being used for it, being attractive may mean being targeted for it, being smart may mean being expected to carry more, being calm may mean being denied help, and being strong may mean no one comes.

So when someone asks, “What do you like about yourself?” the survivor may freeze because the answer has never been simple. Every strength came with a bill, every gift had a family interpretation, and every visible quality attracted some form of control. Negative self-talk may then become a hiding place. If the survivor gets there first, no one else can use the good thing against them.

The Body Learns the Critic Too

Negative self-talk is often discussed as if it lives only in thought – but it rarely stays that contained in the mind because the body learns it.

A survivor may flinch when praised, feel heat in the face when seen, tighten the jaw when asked to talk about accomplishments, shrink posture when entering a room with confident people, feel nausea before asking for fair treatment, and lose words when challenged by someone who sounds like an old authority figure.

The nervous system may treat self-approval as exposure and this is why affirmations can fail so quickly for trauma survivors. Repeating “I am worthy” may sound harmless from the outside, but to a body trained on shame, the sentence can feel false, unsafe, or ridiculous. The survivor may reject it before the words have any chance to settle.

The problem is not the survivor’s unwillingness to heal, it’s that the body was trained in a different language. A person taught for years to expect criticism cannot always absorb kindness on command because they often need smaller, more credible sentences at first.

I handled that better than I used to.
I told the truth there.
I was tired, not lazy.
I was scared, not weak.
I made one choice that protected me.
I can dislike something without explaining my whole existence.

Those sentences may lack inspirational shine but that’s likely why they work better. They do not ask the survivor to leap from contempt to self-love in one theatrical jump. They ask for accuracy, and accuracy is a safer starting place than forced positivity.

Relearning Self-Description Takes More Than Compliments

People often try to help by arguing with the survivor’s negative self-talk.

“You are not too much.”
“You are beautiful.”
“You are smart.”
“You are strong.”
“You are a good person.”

Those statements may be sincere, but they may also bounce off a nervous system that never learned how to receive them. The survivor often needs something sturdier than reassurance. They may need to rebuild self-description from observable fact.

What did I do?
What did it cost me?
What did I protect?
What did I survive?
Where did I show restraint?
Where did I tell the truth?
Where did I keep going without turning cruel?
Where did I make a choice that my younger self could not make?

The aim is not inflated confidence – it’s a self-description that can survive contact with reality.

A trauma survivor may begin with modest but accurate language.

I am learning to pause before blaming myself.
I am allowed to name effort even when the outcome was messy.
I can be flawed without being defective.
I can be responsible without being sentenced to self-hatred.
I can own harm without becoming only harm.

This work may feel dreadfully slow but that’s because the old soundbites in the mind are faster… predictable. Despite it’s intent at the time or dysfunction driving it, those soundbites have family approval behind it, cultural reinforcement behind it, and sometimes years of therapeutic misunderstanding behind it if a helper mistook self-attack for insight. So the new language has to be built through use.

Five Positive Things May Begin as Evidence, Not Feeling

A survivor may not feel the truth of positive self-description at first, and that is totally okay. Feeling can come later because evidence has to begin anyway.

Instead of asking, “Do I feel worthy?” the survivor may ask, “What facts have I ignored because shame edited the report?”

Did I survive conditions that required adaptation?
Did I protect someone, including myself, when protection was costly?
Did I learn something I was never taught?
Did I keep a conscience in a room where conscience was inconvenient?
Did I return to life after years of being trained to disappear?

The first list may be uncomfortable – awkward. It may feel like wearing clothes that do not yet fit, but that doesn’t make the statements untrue. Many survivors have practiced negative self-description for decades. Positive self-recognition will not always feel natural just because it is overdue.

Start with what can be verified.

I came back.
I learned the skill.
I told the truth.
I left the room.
I stayed kind without staying silent.
I protected the part of me that was almost trained out.

Those are not slogans – they are corrected entries in a historical file.

Sources 

Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. International Universities Press.

Courtois, C. A., & Ford, J. D. (2016). Treatment of complex trauma: A sequenced, relationship-based approach. Guilford Press.

Gilbert, P. (2010). The compassionate mind: A new approach to life’s challenges. New Harbinger Publications.

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

Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992). Shattered assumptions: Towards a new psychology of trauma. Free Press.

Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and guilt. Guilford Press.

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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

What helps you feel emotionally safe?

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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

There is a strange thing that can happen when a trauma survivor finally reaches a quieter life. They do not relax; they wait. They wait for the phone call, the slammed door, the accusation, the shift in someone’s tone, the bill they forgot, the person who seemed fine yesterday but may turn cold today. They wait for the next threat, even when nothing in the room says a threat is present. The body is not being dramatic. It is running an old survival program that once helped that person stay alive, stay prepared, stay watchful, or stay out of the way.

That is one of the crueler parts of trauma recovery. Safety may arrive before the nervous system believes it. A person can be out of the violent home, away from the abusive partner, years removed from the childhood environment, and still feel uneasy when nothing bad is happening. Sometimes the uneasiness gets worse when nothing bad is happening. Calm can feel staged. Quiet can feel temporary. Stability can feel like the pause before someone changes the rules. Kindness can feel like the first move in a longer game.

People who have not lived this often misunderstand it. They may say, “You’re safe now,” as if the survivor missed an obvious fact. They may think reassurance should work quickly because the danger is no longer visible. Some even become hurt or annoyed when the survivor cannot receive peace the way they expected.

But trauma does not train the nervous system through reassurance. It trains through repetition, shock, betrayal, threat, helplessness, and consequence. If safety once disappeared without warning, the body may not trust safety just because the room is quiet.

Safety Is More Than the Absence of Danger

Most people think safety means danger is gone. For trauma survivors, that definition is too thin. Safety is not only the absence of yelling. It is not only the absence of violence, manipulation, chaos, humiliation, addiction, neglect, sexual threat, emotional punishment, or household unpredictability. Those absences are necessary. No one heals well while the injury is still being repeated.

But safety also has to become recognizable inside the body, and this is where many survivors get blindsided. A survivor may enter a genuinely safer environment and still carry an internal alarm system calibrated to the old one. The body may scan for changes in tone. It may track footsteps. It may notice silence that lasts too long. It may read a delayed reply as rejection, facial neutrality as contempt, ordinary conflict as abandonment, or someone else’s mood as an incoming threat.

This is often misperceived a weakness but, in reality, it is conditioning. The nervous system learned that small cues could mean trouble. Sometimes they did. In a dangerous home, the shift from ordinary to unsafe can happen fast. A look across the room may tell a child whether to disappear. A pause in a conversation may tell a partner whether an explosion is coming. A change in breathing may tell someone whether to leave, freeze, flatter, explain, comply, or brace.

Then later, in safer adult life, those same detection systems keep firing. Sure, the danger has changed, but the body has not caught up yet.

Temporary Calm Trains the Body to Wait

One reason safety can feel like a trap is that many trauma survivors did not grow up with steady calm. They grew up with temporary calm and temporary calm is very different.

Temporary calm is the quiet before someone starts drinking again. The soft voice before the accusation, the good day before the withdrawal, the apology before the next incident, the holiday where everyone performs normal life for visitors, the clean kitchen before the screaming starts, and the calm adult who stays calm only until the child makes one wrong sound.

A nervous system raised around temporary calm does not automatically experience quiet as relief – instead, it’s more like a countdown.

That survivor may become more tense when things are peaceful. They may create tasks, problems, plans, or mental noise because stillness leaves too much room for waiting. They may over-prepare, over-check, over-explain, over-clean, or over-function. They may feel restless in healthy relationships because nobody is making them earn their place every few minutes.

Then the shame comes in. They know they “should” enjoy the calm yet may feel guilty for not enjoying it. They may tell themselves they are ungrateful, damaged, difficult, or impossible to satisfy. And that kind of self-attack does not help the nervous system learn safety. In reality, it adds another layer of pressure.

The Body May Associate Safety With Exposure

For some survivors, danger did not arrive when they were already guarded. It arrived when they trusted, slept, disclosed, hoped, loved, laughed, needed, rested, or believed someone. And that personal history leaves a mark.

• If vulnerability was punished, the body may treat peace as exposure.
• If tenderness was followed by betrayal, kindness may feel suspicious. If rest was interrupted by chaos, sleep may feel unsafe.
• If asking for help led to ridicule or punishment, dependence may feel humiliating.
• If happiness drew jealousy, mockery, sabotage, or control, joy may feel risky.

This is why a survivor may seem calm during crisis but uneasy during intimacy.

Crisis is familiar and gives the body a job. The survivor knows how to assess, act, manage, scan, solve, or endure. Quiet safety asks for something much more difficult. It asks the survivor to lower the shield without knowing, at first, whether lowering it is a wise or safe move. For someone who survived repeated harm, the fear is not always danger itself. Sometimes the fear is being unprepared for danger. Vigilance can feel like participation while trust can feel like standing still in a room where the exits have not been checked.

That is a large request for a nervous system that learned survival by staying ready.

Why Safer Life Can Feel Worse at First

From the outside, mistrust of safety can look confusing. A survivor may pull away from stable people and may become irritable when life improves. They may feel emotionally flat after good news, mistrust a partner who is consistent, and feel more anxious after leaving the unsafe situation than they felt while inside it. That last one especially confuses people, but it happens.

During active survival, the body often stays organized around immediate demands. Get through the day, keep the peace, watch the mood, protect the children or pets, hide the evidence, make the money, say the right thing, avoid the explosion, and by all means, do not collapse… yet.

Once the survivor gets out, the body may finally begin releasing what it had to hold. And that release can feel like deterioration when it is delayed impact. The survivor may think they are feeling worse because distance gives the system room to reveal the damage. That does not mean the safer life is wrong. It means the nervous system needs time, repetition, and evidence. Not one peaceful day, not one kind conversation, not one safe person making promises, but repeated evidence for your body and mind. In other words, safety has to stop being an idea and become lived experience.

Rebuilding Safety Is Often Repetitive Work

Real safety recovery is not usually a sudden breakthrough where the survivor announces they are healed and then moves through life regulated forever. Instead, it may look like noticing that someone disagreed without punishing you, going to sleep and waking up without crisis, asking a simple question and receiving a simple answer, a partner staying steady during inconvenience, a friend respecting a boundary without sulking, a therapist not rushing interpretation, or the survivor leaving a room and realizing no one chased them, mocked them, or made them pay for it later.

Small evidence counts because trauma was often built from small evidence too. The nervous system did not learn danger only from major events, it learned from the repeated signals surrounding those events. Tone, timing, facial shifts, silence, footsteps, doorways, names called from another room, text messages, late arrivals, alcohol breath, forced smiles, and the false calm before punishment.

So recovery often requires a new body record. Consistency is not glamorous, but it can be corrective.

Safe People Do Not Demand Instant Trust

One of the cleanest ways to assess safety is to watch how people respond to a survivor’s pace. Unsafe people often demand trust as proof of loyalty. They rush disclosure, punish hesitation, frame boundaries as rejection, become offended when the survivor needs time, and may say, “After everything I’ve done for you, you still don’t trust me?”

That is not safety, it’s pressure with better manners. Safe people do not need instant access and do not treat a trauma survivor’s caution as an insult. They understand that trust built under pressure is compliance, not trust. This does not mean survivors should never challenge their fear. Avoidance can shrink a life until the person is technically protected but emotionally imprisoned. Healing does require risk, practice, and contact with situations that are uncomfortable but not actually dangerous.

But the pace has to make sense because a survivor needs enough challenge to grow and enough control to stay present. Too little challenge can keep life small but too much challenge can recreate helplessness. That middle ground is where real trauma work often lives.

The Goal Is Accurate Response, Not Constant Calm

A healthy nervous system does not feel safe every second. That’s a good thing because that would not be realistic or useful. The goal is accuracy. An accurate response.

A recovering trauma survivor learns, slowly, to tell the difference between old danger and current risk. Between discomfort and threat. Between disappointment and abandonment. Between someone’s bad mood and personal danger. Between a pause and rejection. Between privacy and secrecy. Between conflict and catastrophe.

That takes work because trauma compresses categories and teaches the body to treat many different signals as one warning: harm is coming. Recovery begins separating those signals again.

That process is not always smooth especially when survivors overcorrect. They may trust too fast in one season and trust no one in the next, mistake boredom for safety or intensity for connection, and may confuse predictability with emotional deadness because chaos once felt like proof that something serious was happening.

This is where patience has to be practical rather than sentimental and that’s why the nervous system needs new data, and new data takes time.

When Safety Starts to Feel Real

Safety begins to feel real when the body stops waiting for every calm moment to turn. It may happen quietly. For examples, a survivor realizes they did not flinch when the phone rang, did not rehearse 12 explanations before answering a message, have finally slept through the night, allowed someone to be mildly disappointed without rushing to fix it, and accepted kindness without immediately searching for the catch.

For a trauma survivor, these are not minor moments – they often signal steps in a major nervous-system correction. Safety does not become real because someone announces it. It only becomes real when the survivor’s body has enough repeated evidence to stop treating peace as a setup.

That is why telling themselves “you’re safe now” can feel hollow when it is said too soon. Instead, saying “my body may need time to believe what my life is trying to show it” is more accurate. It also accurately reflects the work. Not forced trust, not denial, and not pretending the past is over because the address changed, the relationship ended, or the crisis passed. The work is teaching the body, through repeated reality, that calm does not always mean danger is waiting behind the door.

Sometimes calm is just calm and, for many survivors, believing that is not the beginning of recovery – it is one of the hardest-earned outcomes.

Sources

Courtois, C. A., & Ford, J. D. (2016). Treatment of complex trauma: A sequenced, relationship-based approach. Guilford Press.

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

National Institute of Mental Health. (2025). Post-traumatic stress disorder. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2014). SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD. (2025). Complex PTSD. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

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

How have you changed through healing?

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