I surely can’t be the only one to pin myself up against the wall and peek through the curtains, waiting for the knocking to stop. Have you ever begged the universe to please let the person on the other side of the door be the UPS guy, so you know he’ll be on his merry way? Once, I hid for an hour because someone wouldn’t stop knocking. I didn’t care what they had to sell; I didn’t want it. I didn’t care what they had to say; I didn’t want to hear it. As it turned out, no one was at the door. I’d been hiding from a persistent woodpecker that had decided to tap manically on the side of my house.

Unfortunately, its Morse code failed to reach the logical parts of my brain; I only felt a wave of “baseless” fear. 

After a lot of therapy and work to regulate my nervous system, I have fewer of the moments I described above. I’m getting better at answering the door. These days, I often voluntarily leave my hidey hole to “connect” with others and even socialize.

I’ve come a long way in recognizing moments of emotional hijack, but I still have work to do.

For example, I’m writing this article because I’ve fled my house like a refugee. I’m not in danger, but I feel like I am. Why? Because an event in my neighborhood has suddenly swelled the population of my small community. It’s amplified my general fear of unexpected visits from people. Why would I feel fear in this context?

It’s simple. The anxiety around the unknown catapults me into a state of panic, locking me in terror about what could come next. When my safety feels compromised, naturally, my fear responses kick in. Having a sense of “control” of my surroundings makes me feel safe.

Usually, I’m able to ground myself and connect with the logical parts of my brain that know I’m safe. I’m getting better at working through these mental and physical nightmares. Other times, my fear responses do all the talking. All humans have fear responses, which are automatic, survival-driven physiological and psychological reactions designed to keep us safe.

These responses came in especially handy in prehistoric times when the threat of being mauled by a predator in the wild wasn’t out of the question. In modern times, this bodily and mental alarm system is less necessary most of the time. For those of us who have lived in persistently dangerous situations like chaotic childhood homes or in abusive relationships as adults, however, these fear responses have gotten a regular workout.

Our nervous systems, already hardwired by nature to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn in the face of danger, often become dysregulated. Our mind and body learn to “warn us” in situations that don’t warrant fear in most people because something about the moment sets off the alarm bells in our overstimulated nervous systems. Suddenly, we’re off to the races, held hostage by our go-to fear responses.

Depending on the situation, I freeze and play a solo game of possum, or, if possible, I flee. Although the logical part of my brain steps in sooner than it once did, it can be tricky when I’m going through a depressive slump. My whole system is just enough off kilter that it doesn’t take much to shift into the fear responses that feel as natural as breathing. Add a hefty dose of depression to the mix, and I find myself on the floor looking at dust bunnies long after the knocking has stopped. 

In fairness, my tendency to avoid people is partly a natural extension of my introverted nature. I need my space to recharge. But it’s more than that.

I think, like so many things, it’s related to trauma. For years, I made myself invisible in a way that extended beyond garden-variety introversion. Some of my reactions cannot be attributed solely to wanting to avoid attention or to being mentally drained from too much “on” time. Wanting to avoid people is one thing, but when fear suddenly pulsates through your body like an angry heavy metal song, it’s a clue that there’s more at play.

These strong physical reactions can be debilitating. Avoiding them can become a way of life.

Over time, I learned to avoid connections altogether. No matter the setting—my child’s baseball game, the office, or even the bread aisle at the grocery store—I shielded myself from others’ eyes and interest. These habits started in childhood; I learned early on to blend into the background and hide my presence. When I was quiet and withdrawn, I was out of sight, out of mind. I mastered a kind of isolated invisibility, and for good reason. I did this because I learned early on that people are unpredictable and can be dangerous. Danger can, in fact, be on the other side of your door. 

Accustomed to recoiling or running away in fear since I was in diapers, I’m working to retrain my body. I’m trying to convince myself that not everyone and everything is dangerous. I’m working hard to pull myself out of the shadows. The protective bubble around me is expanding while my perpetual anxiety around the possibility of getting hurt shrinks incrementally. The weight of my self-doubt and fear of falling short or being too much is finally receding. Many days, I succeed in this effort to free myself from the shadows.

I challenge myself to “put myself out there” or, at the very least, not run away. It usually turns out okay. Some days, I take significant strides beyond the dark weight of the shadows. On those days, it feels good to be “seen” after all these years of feeling invisible.

Other days, like today, I silently beg the universe to grant me an invisibility cloak. In these moments, I feel frozen in a place I no longer want to live. At the same time, I realize it’s okay to sit in these dark places and hide occasionally…as long as I don’t linger. Sometimes “hiding” is an act of self-care, but there’s a point when self-imposed social isolation transitions into unhealthy territory. I’m learning where that line is and how I can best support myself in those moments of unsolicited terror.

For a long time, I thought I was the only one who experienced this ongoing battle between a desire for invisibility and a desperate plea to be “seen.” I’m finally realizing I’m not alone in this struggle.

I’ve met more and more people like me over time. I’m one of many hiding in the safe cove of the shadows. Others take back stairways to avoid contact with colleagues or walk across the street to avoid saying “hi” to an acquaintance on days when even a two-word exchange feels like too much. Some days, the internal overwhelm makes it impossible for me to stretch myself. I occasionally worry that if I share these inner thoughts and fears, I will be deemed “insane.”

If you are reading this, you may be shaking your head in camaraderie on some level. Fortunately, our fear responses have little to do with sanity and everything to do with searching for safety. Many of us feel like we will never be safe, but it’s human nature to seek safety. Because we may find safety in hiding, we may subsequently feel resigned to never being truly “seen.” Wanting to be seen and understood, I think, is also human nature. So, here we find ourselves…at these strange crossroads of wanting two things that feel incompatible. They may feel that way, but that doesn’t mean they are.

I’ll never meet most of the people who read my words, but I can tell you this: I see you. I understand. We may be hiding, but we are not hiding alone. Nor are we invisible.

I recently asked myself, “Where the hell were you kindred spirits when I was in my teens and twenties”? I felt “weird” for hiding from people like a vampire fleeing the first rays of the morning sun. I assumed there was something wrong with me and that I was completely alone in my fear of people.

As it turns out, there was nothing wrong with me; my actions were self-protective. And…I’m not alone in this fear of people. Decades later, I finally realized why I couldn’t find “my people” for so long. I laughed out loud when it hit me: you were hiding too! It’s one of those “funny, not funny” kinds of things. Many of us play an ongoing game of hide-and-seek with the world. We all have our reasons. Sometimes, retreating into hiding is exactly what we need. We’ve earned that right. We also deserve to be seen.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned on my healing pilgrimage is that two opposing things can be true at the same time. We can hide while we also seek, and even in those moments of hiding, we can still be seen. I want to remind all my fellow hiders that we’re never actually alone…sometimes we only feel that way because we’re in hiding. That’s okay, though…we’ll come out when we’re ready. Until then, we can keep each other company. And…when we heal, peek-a-boo world, here we come!

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I understand why that line spreads. A lot of survivors were dismissed, mislabeled, overmedicated, mocked, or treated like a problem instead of a person. A lot of people carrying complex trauma were called “difficult” before anybody bothered to ask what happened to them. Some were tagged with personality disorder language in settings where the real issue was chronic trauma, attachment injury, coercive environments, or all of it piled together. That part is real. I would never deny it.

What I do deny is the lazy conclusion people try to build on top of that history. Misdiagnosis is real. Clinical sloppiness is real. Trauma blindness is real. None of that proves that personality disorders are fictional.

The ‘no such thing as a personality disorder’ claim is not trauma informed. It is clinically careless.

• The category

Personality disorders still exist in the diagnostic systems clinicians use. The American Psychiatric Association describes them as long-term patterns of inner experience and behavior that differ markedly from cultural expectations and affect thinking, emotional response, relationships, and impulse control. The World Health Organization still includes personality disorder in ICD-11. The National Institute of Mental Health still describes borderline personality disorder as a serious mental disorder associated with instability in mood, behavior, self-image, and functioning. Those are not relics hiding in a dusty manual nobody uses. They remain part of active clinical diagnosis and treatment.

That does not mean the field is perfect. It means the field has not abolished the concept just because social media users got tired of it.

• The confusion

The confusion usually starts in a place that makes emotional sense. Survivors recognize that trauma can change a person’s emotional regulation, sense of self, trust, attachment, threat perception, memory, body response, and relationships. That is true. Trauma can do enormous damage, especially when it is chronic, developmental, relational, or starts early. PTSD and CPTSD are not minor conditions. They can shape daily life for years. The WHO and VA both distinguish CPTSD from PTSD by adding disturbances in self-organization, including problems with affect regulation, negative self-concept, and relational difficulties.

Because those features can overlap with what people see in some personality disorders, especially borderline presentations, people start flattening the picture. They move from “these conditions can look similar” to “one of them must be fake.”

That leap is where the reasoning breaks.

Overlap is not identity. Shared symptoms do not erase separate diagnoses. Medicine deals with overlap all the time. Chest pain does not mean every heartburn case is a heart attack and every heart attack is heartburn. Similar surface features do not settle the diagnosis. Careful differential assessment does.

• The trauma claim

When people say, “It is all trauma,” they are usually trying to do one of 3 things.

(1) Trying to correct old damage. They have seen trauma survivors mislabeled and they want that history acknowledged. Fair enough.

(2) Trying to make the language feel less stigmatizing. They think trauma sounds compassionate and personality disorder sounds condemning. I understand that impulse too.

(3) Doing what the internet does best. They are collapsing a hard subject into a slogan.

The first 2 come from somewhere human. The third is where damage multiplies.

Trauma can be a major risk factor in the development of later psychiatric problems. That includes disorders involving emotion regulation, identity, relationships, and impulse control. But “risk factor” is not the same as “sole cause,” and “common contributor” is not the same as “universal explanation.” Human beings are built from temperament, development, biology, learning history, attachment, family systems, social environment, reinforcement patterns, and plain individual variation.

Trauma is powerful. It is not the only variable in the room.

A survivor-centered view should be accurate enough to hold that complexity. Survivors deserve more than slogans designed to win internet applause.

• The misdiagnosis problem

Here is the part that has to be said plainly. Some trauma survivors have absolutely been misdiagnosed with personality disorders. Some clinicians have used personality language as shorthand for “hard to treat,” “emotionally intense,” “noncompliant,” “female,” “angry,” or “I do not understand this person.” That has happened. Some patients were harmed by it.

But the existence of misdiagnosis does not cancel the existence of the diagnosis.

If that logic were sound, then every diagnosis would disappear. People get misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism, PTSD, depression, and medical illnesses too. We do not solve that by pretending those conditions are imaginary. We solve it by improving assessment, slowing down, checking trauma history, checking development, checking symptom pattern, checking duration, checking function, and refusing to confuse personal opinion with diagnosis.

That is the adult answer. Not hashtags. Not purity language. Not diagnostic abolition by tweet.

• The survivor cost

There is another reason this slogan bothers me. It does not just distort psychiatry. It also fails survivors.

A person with CPTSD needs accurate recognition of trauma-related symptoms. A person with a personality disorder needs accurate recognition of enduring maladaptive patterns that may require specific treatment approaches. A person with both needs both seen clearly. Pretending everything belongs in one basket may sound gentle, but in practice it can block the right treatment, the right expectations, and the right language for what is happening. NIMH notes that borderline personality disorder often co-occurs with PTSD, depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, and eating disorders. Co-occurrence is not a footnote here. It is one reason assessment gets hard.

When people erase diagnostic distinction in the name of compassion, they usually end up reducing precision. Reduced precision is not kindness. It is how people stay misunderstood longer.

Some survivors need trauma processing. Some need skills work focused on emotional regulation and interpersonal stability. Some need both. Some need careful medication review because they were medicated for the wrong thing. Some need a clinician who can tell the difference between trauma activation, attachment panic, dissociation, mood disorder, and characterological patterning. That work gets harder, not easier, when public discourse starts treating all severe dysregulation as one giant trauma blob.

• The stigma trap

There is also a stigma problem hiding under this slogan. People say, “It is all trauma,” as if trauma is the compassionate category and personality disorder is the dirty one. That tells me the stigma around personality disorders is still doing a lot of work in the background.

If a person has a personality disorder, that does not make them evil, hopeless, manipulative by nature, or beyond treatment. If a person has CPTSD, that does not make every relational pattern they show reducible to trauma and nothing else. Both ideas are dehumanizing in different ways. One condemns. The other overexplains. Neither sees the full person.

I have never trusted any framework that makes people easier to sort than they are to understand.

• The treatment reality

Another reason the slogan falls apart is treatment reality. The APA published an updated practice guideline on borderline personality disorder in 2024. The existence of a current practice guideline is not trivial. It tells you the field is still actively addressing assessment, treatment planning, psychotherapy, and medication principles for a diagnosis that remains clinically meaningful. Meanwhile, PTSD and CPTSD also have defined treatment paths and evolving evidence bases. These are not interchangeable lanes just because online discourse wants a cleaner moral story.

If everything were simply trauma and nothing else, we would not still need differential diagnosis. We do need it. We need it because people are not identical. Their histories are not identical. Their presentations are not identical. Their treatment response is not identical.

That is not cold. That is respectful.

• The public problem

What worries me most is how fast non-clinical certainty gets rewarded now. Somebody with four followers and no background or education in mental health can post a clean little certainty bomb and it starts circulating because it feels morally superior to clinical ambiguity. People hear “personality disorder” and think blame. They hear “trauma” and think innocence. But diagnosis is not supposed to be a moral sorting system. It is supposed to help describe patterns accurately enough that treatment has a chance.

Once diagnosis becomes a political identity statement, everybody loses. Survivors lose. Families lose. Clinicians lose. People trying to recover lose. The loudest person in the room gets to redefine terms they never studied, and then the rest of us are left cleaning up the wreckage.

I am definitely not interested in protecting old psychiatric arrogance. I am interested in protecting reality from oversimplification.

Trauma is real. CPTSD is real. PTSD is real. Personality disorders are real. Misdiagnosis is real too. That is the whole picture, and people who have actually sat with suffering long enough know better than to flatten it for social media.

The cleaner sentence is this one: trauma explains a lot, but it does not explain everything, and it does not make personality disorders imaginary. And that is where the thought should stop.

Sources

American Psychiatric Association. (2024, December 10). American Psychiatric Association publishes updated practice guideline on the treatment of borderline personality disorder.

American Psychiatric Association. (n.d.). Personality disorders. In Patients and families.

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Borderline personality disorder.

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Personality disorders.

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Traumatic events and post-traumatic stress disorder.

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

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD. (n.d.). Complex PTSD: Assessment and treatment.

World Health Organization. (2024, March 8). Clinical descriptions and diagnostic requirements for ICD-11 mental, behavioural and neurodevelopmental disorders.

World Health Organization. (2024, May 27). Post-traumatic stress disorder.

World Health Organization. (n.d.). International classification of diseases, 11th revision.

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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

Who cares what you think about yourself?

Well, you do–yes, really. The reason is that you matter, and your presence in this world matters.

Think about the last meaningful conversation that you had with someone. What happened, and how did you leave it? Did you feel happy about it, or not?

Why did you feel that way?

Everything you do in life matters, and believe it or not, people do pay attention.

Think about the last time you made a stupid mistake. How quickly did people notice and comment? Did someone make a joke at your expense?

How about the last time you did something amazing–like getting your first year sober, or passing an exam? People notice these things and want to celebrate your successes.

I used to think no one noticed me, but when I looked for evidence, I found clear examples of people hearing, seeing, and noticing me.

My point is, we don’t often pause and think about ourselves because we are too busy. But by ignoring our feelings, we miss more than we can ever consider.

Think about someone who makes you happy. It could be a family member or a good friend.

What’s special about them? What do you value in them?

Do they have a great sense of humor? Maybe they’re a good listener, or someone with positive energy? Perhaps you value their kindness the most? Maybe they have some other qualities that sets them apart from others.

Someone told me recently that they like being with me because “I made them feel seen,” because I listen.

Now turn those same questions to yourself.

What’s special about you? What qualities do people value in you? What type of friend and colleague are you? What sets you apart from others?

What comments do you get from people?

How do you feel about yourself? Is your answer positive, balanced, or negative?

How do you think your perceptions affect your life?

Self-worth vs. self-esteem

These two words sound similar, but they do have different meanings.

Self-worth is the way you value yourself. It is the way you believe in yourself–that you are good enough to receive love, respect, and kindness from other people.

People with low self-esteem generally have a negative view of themselves. They are usually quick to judge or evaluate themselves by criticizing their own actions, brushing off compliments, and focusing on mistakes.

Living without self-worth makes is very difficult to put yourself first. For example, you may not go for that opportunity because you feel other people are better than you. You might stay in an abusive relationship because you don’t feel that you deserve better from life.

You are the one who initiates what happens in your life. It all starts with you. Your overall health is important because it affects the ways in which you feel, think, and behave.

Having low self-worth puts you at risk for many health conditions, like anxiety and depression. Over time, these can lead to problems such as phobias and substance abuse.

Self-esteem relies on external factors like successes and achievements. It can change how you value yourself with life’s ups and downs.

A breakup can make you feel low for weeks–even months afterward. A failed college exam can have a similar effect on your mood and how you see yourself.

An abusive relationship can put a major dent in your self-esteem and make you feel bad about yourself.

Don’t let life bring you down.

It’s time you look up and put yourself first. Who else is going to look out for you?

People who are happy generally have high self-esteem and self-worth. They take greater care of themselves by making better life choices and live fuller lives. They know their own strengths and limitations, and face life’s challenges with resilience.

It’s not selfish to take care of yourself.

Many people struggle with self-worth and self-esteem. The great thing is that you can learn to see yourself in a more positive light with some practice.

Turning it around

Self-compassion is great way to start feeling better about yourself. Start each day by being kind to yourself. Instead of seeing mistakes and flaws, think about yourself the same way as you see your loved ones, and those you value most.

Treat yourself with respect instead of criticizing everything you say and do. Remind yourself every now and again that it’s okay to make mistakes. You’ll soon notice the difference in your attitude.

Take notice of how you are feeling, and own those feelings. You’ll start to feel much more in tune with yourself–and with those around you.

My name is Lizzy. I’m a trauma survivor, a wife, a mom, a teacher, and an author.

If you like reading my posts, then please follow me.

For more about me: www.elizabethwoodsauthor.com

Support your fellow writer:

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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

In the first article, we explored what developmental trauma is — not a single event, but an environment of ongoing fear that shapes a child’s nervous system over time. Understanding this raises an important and haunting question:

If developmental trauma is formed in childhood, why do its effects continue long after the danger has passed?

The answer does not lie in weakness or personality, but in adaptation.

To understand developmental trauma, we must grasp a simple yet profound truth: the nervous system’s primary job is survival.

It is not concerned with happiness, success, or even emotional comfort. It asks only one question, over and over again:

Am I safe?

And when safety is absent, it asks a second:

What must I do to stay alive here?

When Children Cannot Escape

A child cannot leave the home.
A child cannot overpower a parent.
A child cannot fully understand what is happening or why.
And perhaps most importantly, a child cannot stop needing attachment.

Even when caregivers are frightening or unpredictable, the child’s survival depends on maintaining a connection with them. The nervous system, therefore, faces an impossible task: remain attached to the very people who feel dangerous.

Because fight-or-flight is not a viable option, the body turns to other strategies. 

It adapts.

Not consciously. Not deliberately. But biologically.

The child’s nervous system begins organizing itself around survival rather than safety.

Survival Wiring

When fear is occasional, the nervous system activates and then returns to a state of rest. But when fear is constant, survival becomes the baseline. 

Being Hunted

As a small child, the back of my uncle’s pick-up truck was filled with odd and interesting things. While the adults were occupied elsewhere, I crawled up to investigate. Falling against the edge of an aluminum pipe, I cut my forehead and began to bleed. 

Panic. 

I raced to the kitchen, grabbed a towel, and hid behind the living room door. The towel became drenched in blood. When I was eventually discovered, the doctor in the emergency room said it had been too long for stitches. He did something called a butterfly bandage. 

Most children would have immediately run to a parent for help. Not so with me. My parents were the source of danger and the last place I would have gone. I was the problem, and even at that young age, I knew I would be blamed for the accident. Living in my home was like being hunted, and hiding was my only option. I spent a lot of time disappearing. Unfortunately, it was never enough.

When a child grows up in such an atmosphere, survival responses stop feeling temporary. They become normal.

The child learns to scan constantly for emotional weather shifts.
To anticipate moods before words are spoken.
To become small, quiet, helpful, or invisible.
To manage the emotions of others in order to prevent escalation.

These responses are often misunderstood later in life as personality traits:

hypervigilance
people-pleasing
perfectionism
emotional numbing
freeze or shutdown
difficulty resting
chronic guilt or self-blame

These are not flaws. They are survival solutions. Each behavior served a purpose.

Hypervigilance — predicts danger before it arrives.
Compliance — reduces conflict.
Perfectionism— attempts to secure safety through approval.
Emotional numbing— protects from overwhelm.
Freeze— minimizes attention when escape is impossible.

The nervous system was not malfunctioning. It was learning.

Survival Wiring vs. Safety Wiring

Children raised in safe environments develop differently — not because they are stronger, but because their nervous systems receive a different message.

Safety wiring allows for curiosity, play, exploration, and rest. Mistakes do not threaten connection. Emotions are regulated rather than escalated.

But in developmental trauma, the nervous system grows around vigilance instead of ease.

Where safety wiring says, the world is predictable, survival wiring says, stay ready.

Where safety wiring allows rest, survival wiring maintains alertness.

Where safety wiring encourages self-expression, survival wiring prioritizes protection.

These are adaptations to different environments, not differences in strength or character. The child’s body simply learns the rules required to survive the world it was given.

Symptoms as Safety Valves

Trauma researcher Peter Levine describes many trauma symptoms as attempts by the nervous system to regulate overwhelming emotions. What later appears dysfunctional often began as a form of protection.

In developmental trauma, these adaptations were not responses to a single overwhelming moment but to thousands of smaller moments that never fully resolved. The nervous system held onto survival energy because it never received the signal that danger had ended.

What we later call anxiety, dissociation, or emotional dysregulation can be understood differently:

not as pathology,
But as unfinished protection.

The body continued using the strategies that once worked because, for a long time, they were necessary.

The Cost of Adaptation

The tragedy of developmental trauma is not that the child adapted. Adaptation is what made survival possible. The difficulty comes later, when the environment changes, but the nervous system does not yet know it is safe.

What the child learned in chronic fear continues for the rest of their life unless intervention through therapy, self-awareness, or self-discovery takes place. The tentacles of developmental trauma impact every aspect of life. Self-perception, emotions, stress, and relationships, to name just a few.  There is not one area of life left untouched.

Adults who survive developmental trauma may find themselves unable to relax even when life is stable. Calm feels unfamiliar. Kindness feels suspicious. Rest produces anxiety instead of relief.

Joy itself can feel unsafe.

These reactions are confusing until we understand their origin. The nervous system learned vigilance because vigilance once meant survival.

Nothing About You Was Random

The question shifts from:

What is wrong with me?

to

What did my nervous system have to do to keep me alive?

Seen this way, many lifelong struggles begin to make sense.

Your responses were not signs of damage. They were evidence of intelligence under impossible conditions.

The nervous system did not fail you. It protected you in the only ways it could.

Healing does not begin by fighting those adaptations, but by gently teaching the body something new — that survival is no longer the only option.

Safety (slowly and patiently) can become normal, too.

Defying trauma and embracing joy is a process, and every step forward, no matter how small, is a victory.

Next in the series:
“The Invisible Messages We Absorbed: The Inner World of Developmental Trauma 

To sign up for a free monthly newsletter about trauma, go to : https://rebekahlaynebrown.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

You’ve walked through storms that tested every part of you, and you stood back up, with courage in your heart.

PTSD may have shaped part of your story, but it does not define who you are. You are still whole, still capable, and your light and strength are still in your heart — they have only been waiting for you to see them again.

On this path of recovery, there will be moments of grief, anger, and pain. Let’s not push these feelings away or keep them bottled up. At such times, it helps to sit together, speak with compassion, and support one another.

Despite the past, I want you to believe in yourself. The strength that carried you through the darkness is the same strength that can now guide you toward healing. You have the power to begin anew, to rebuild your life piece by piece into something peaceful, meaningful, and filled with joy.

There is no rush, healing moves at the pace of kindness. Just breathe. Take one small step, then another. Trust that each moment of courage counts, and every gentle choice you make for yourself is a quiet victory.

Leave the pain where it belongs, in yesterday. Open your heart to the possibility that tomorrow can feel lighter. You deserve happiness, love, and a life that feels like home.

You’ve survived the hardest parts already. Now, it’s time to live again: freely, bravely, and filled with hope. The future is yours to create, and it can be beautiful beyond measure.

You are now becoming whole in new and beautiful ways. Gently step into your own light, and trust that every day holds a chance for renewal. You deserve peace. You deserve love. You deserve the good life you’ve always dreamed of: because it’s still waiting for you.

I want you to know that I understand because I’ve walked that path too. You’re not alone in this journey. If you ever need someone to talk to, a voice that listens and truly believes in your courage — I’m here. Always.

With Love and Light,
Jeanne💗

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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

That is one of the hardest parts of very early trauma.

If the injury happens at the beginning, people often assume it should not count. They assume that if you cannot consciously remember an event, the event cannot have shaped you. That has never made sense to me. The nervous system does not wait for language before it starts recording rupture, loss, distress, and discontinuity.

I was adopted as an infant in 1964, during a period when infant adoption was widely treated as a private solution, and children were rarely given language for the loss built into that beginning. In that era, secrecy was common, records were restricted, and adoptees were often expected to understand their story through gratitude rather than grief. I know what it is like to grow up carrying something deep and destabilizing while being told, directly or indirectly, that I should frame the story as gratitude. That never sat right with me. It still does not. The fact that an experience is socially defended does not mean it was harmless to the person who had to live inside it.

A lot of people want to begin the adoption story at the adoptive home. I do not.

I begin at the infant’s first independent breath.

For me, that matters because birth is the point where separation stops being abstract and becomes physical. A baby has spent roughly 9 to 10 months inside one body, regulated by one biological source, hearing one internal rhythm, exposed to one voice pattern, one scent field, and one continuous environment of protection. Then birth happens. Breathing becomes independent. The infant experiences the loss of its first and only known source.

That is not a small thing.

People can argue all day about what a newborn does or does not consciously understand. I am not talking about adult interpretation inside an infant brain. I am talking about the body. I am talking about loss of the known source. I am talking about the sudden disappearance of continuity. I am talking about a human system built around contact, regulation, and protection being forced into separation before it has any way to make sense of what has happened.

That is why I have never found the usual reassurance helpful. People say the child was chosen. They say the mother loved the baby. They say the surrender was responsible, brave, or necessary. They say the adoptive family wanted the child very badly. None of those sentences answer the infant event. They are adult explanations layered over a bodily rupture. They may comfort the adults involved. They do not erase the infant’s experience.

That is why one of the most useless sentences ever handed to adoptees is this one: “You were chosen.”

No. It is not that simple. We were chosen only after we were rejected. People can argue over terminology. The body does not.

That line bothers people because they want rejection to sound like a moral accusation against the mother. That is not how I mean it. I mean it as lived experience. Whatever adults call it legally, socially, or morally, many adoptees experience the first separation as rejection. The infant body does not receive the explanation. It receives the absence.

This is where trauma survivors get dismissed in a familiar way.

The person describes the wound, and somebody nearby starts correcting the wording. The focus shifts from what happened to whether the survivor has named it in the approved language. Adoption has had too much of that. I have little patience for people who hear the phrase Adopted Child Syndrome and immediately start correcting the term as though that settles the matter.

The term survives because it is trying to name something the system has never wanted named cleanly. Identity fracture. Chronic insecurity. Attachment disturbance. Abandonment fear. Grief without ceremony. Hypervigilance. Difficulty trusting love. A sense that something foundational was broken before life had even properly begun.

Not every adoptee carries that pattern. Not every adoption produces the same damage.

But enough adoptees describe the same internal structure that flat dismissal by professionals stopped sounding clinical to me and started sounding defensive. If the phrase bothers them, then they can build a better one. What they do not get to do is hide behind formal language while adoptees keep describing the same wound over and over again. When the category is messy, experts start acting like the people carrying it are messy too. When the language is imperfect, they pretend the injury might not be real. That is not rigor. That is avoidance.

For some adoptees, the injury does not stop with separation. It is followed by years of emotional editing. The adoptee senses that something is wrong, but the environment keeps insisting that the beginning was a blessing, a rescue, or a gift. That split can do its own damage. First, there is the rupture. Then there is the pressure to deny the rupture. Then there is the loss, followed by the social command to translate that loss into gratitude. A person can live a long time inside that contradiction and come away feeling unstable, disloyal, confused, and ashamed without fully understanding why.

That pattern should be familiar to anyone who lives with complex trauma. A lot of trauma survivors are not wounded only by the original event. They are wounded again by minimization, reframing, disbelief, and forced social interpretations that do not match the body’s experience. The self learns to doubt what it knows. It learns to perform. It learns to stay quiet so that other people can stay comfortable.

Sometimes the trauma changes form. Sometimes it changes address. Sometimes it simply continues.

Closed infant adoption made this worse by removing evidence. Name. lineage. medical history. chronology. context. resemblance. records. truth. That kind of severance does not disappear just because the child is fed, clothed, and photographed. Even if you later despise your biological family, at least you know who they are, where you came from, the shameful and embarrassing stories passed down through generations, and the truth of the line you belong to. Adoptees are often denied even that. Ordinary people take origin for granted. Adoptees often have to excavate it.

And even when adoptees do find biological family, the answer is rarely simple. People often want a neat answer to whether adoptees were better off being adopted. The research does not give one, because it cannot. That question depends on a counterfactual life no one got to live. Some adoptees find their biological family and feel relief, clarity, or a stronger sense of why adoption happened. Others find more grief, more anger, or more damage than they expected. Most do not get a tidy moral ending. They get more truth, and truth is not always comforting.

Non-adoptees are free to discuss adoption. But they are not entitled to speak for adoptees about what adoption feels like, or to force the gratitude story on us.

That matters because survivor testimony is too often treated like a public-relations problem instead of evidence. Not every adopted person is traumatized in the same way. Not every adoption story is the same. Not every adoptive home is harmful. I am not interested in exaggerating the record. I am interested in telling the truth about a pattern many adoptees know intimately and many non-adoptees still rush to soften.

Some of us were injured at the beginning. Some of us were injured again by the demand for gratitude. Some of us were injured again by systems that preferred sentimental language over emotional truth. That does not mean every adoption story ends in damage. It does mean early separation should never be treated as emotionally neutral simply because it happened before memory could become narrative.

For those of us who lived this kind of beginning, the pain was not imaginary. The confusion was not ingratitude. The attachment difficulties were not character flaws. The grief was not disloyalty. Sometimes the first trauma was separation, and the rest of life was shaped by trying to survive a wound nobody wanted named plainly.

That reality deserves honest trauma language, adoption-competent care, and the basic respect of being believed.

Sources 

American Psychological Association. (2024, September 1). Helping adoptive families thrive. Monitor on Psychology, 55(6).

Brodzinsky, D., Gunnar, M. R., & Palacios, J. (2022). Adoption and trauma: Risks, recovery, and the lived experience of adoption. Child Abuse & Neglect, 130(Pt. 2), 105309.

Small, J. L., Dillon, K., Wexler, J. H., Hebert, S., Goldman, R. E., Toll, E., & Geller, A. C. (2025). Unmet health care needs of adult patients adopted in childhood: Insights and recommendations. The Annals of Family Medicine, 23(6), 488-499.

Schaal, B., & Durand, K. (2020). Olfaction scaffolds the developing human from neonate to adolescent and beyond. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 375(1800), 20190266.

Vaglio, S. (2009). Chemical communication and mother-infant recognition. Communicative & Integrative Biology, 2(3), 279-281.

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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

As adults in this day and age, we have the power to stop children from being abused, but many still choose to ignore the obvious. Our children are still suffering at the hands of abusers — even now. It can happen anywhere in the world. It can happen next door in your neighborhood.

We have to be open enough to see what’s going on. Our future generation is at stake here, but we can stop it if we act now.

Child abuse or any type of abuse of another human being should be stopped. The fact that it’s still happening is breaking my heart. I wish I had the power to stop every single one, but I can’t. I need your help.

This article is about spotting those little tell-tale signals that immediately scream that something is not right. I can see abuse from just one look.

A child who is subjected to sexual abuse or any kind of abuse will act differently from their peers.

I know, because I was that child.

It doesn’t matter how frequently abuse happens. A developing brain that has been exposed to trauma will have changed. That child will start to act differently.

The child will use coping mechanisms to survive the trauma any way they can. These coping mechanisms might be the body’s response to what is happening or even a direct threat to carry out a certain behavior by an abuser.

The Frozen child

A deeply traumatized child might suddenly become frozen and withdrawn. or become mute and stare into space (catatonic). They may be sitting with their legs drawn up to their chests and rocking back and forth.

This child is in deep despair and feeling helpless. When a child is in this state, it is unable to communicate because the brain is protecting itself by doing a complete psychological shutdown.

I have been in this state many times, and it is terrifying.

Any child suffering from abuse will build up a strong shell around him / her to survive. They may seem disinterested and rude on the outside, but instead they are deeply hurting inside.

The Control child

A child may display behaviors, such as an innate need to control a situation. They will not trust anyone and be suspicious of new situations. They may seem particularly hypervigilant and may come across as not in control of their bodies; for example, they might display changing emotions in quick succession like anger followed by sadness followed by running away, almost like a traffic light changing colors. The same child may react very oddly to certain situations, like laughing if someone is hurt or starting to cry profusely at a bumblebee that is lying dead in the grass. These are all coping mechanisms from trauma.

The Sudden Change in a Child

A professional looking after children will know them and know if a child suddenly changes behavior, which is a red flag that something is not right. If you suspect something, observe that child at play.

Watch how the child holds itself, how it walks and how it behaves around other children. Watch their language. What does it sound like? Would a normal 6-year-old use “those words” or can you hear something odd?

Notice how the child behaves at pick up and drop off times. What is it like with their caregivers? How does it behave after a long weekend or a vacation?

If anything appears “wrong” you must report it. Start a “behavior journal”. This will build up a true picture of the child. Chances are nothing is going on, but would you be willing to take that risk if something happens?

Avoiding Physical Contact

A child might suddenly hate physical contact or being touched at all. They might even recoil if anyone touches them. A young child might feel so scared and threatened that it hides itself away for long periods.

The child could be sitting under a blanket, hide under a bed, table or behind a sofa or roll up into a ball in a corner sucking a thumb, regressing into baby behavior.

A young child might be overly attached to things like a blanket, pillow or a teddy. Having something soft and tactile could be a small relief for a traumatized child.

An older traumatized child may suddenly seek solitude from everyone and play in an odd way. An older child might want to be left alone, shutting everyone out — alone in their bedroom or in the playground.

The Sudden Artist / Creative child

A child might start creating stories and drawings of the abuse or making up characters who act like abusers. The child might use language that they have been exposed to that contains words a child should not know.

A child who is displaying this type of behavior does not have the language to explain what they are experiencing and will use a medium that they know to make sense of it.

The Child Pushing Physical Limits

A child might suddenly start to push itself excessively hard to the point of collapse, and not realize its body limitations. This is called desensitization.

A child might stay out in the cold and rain too long, not realizing frostbite is forming. In summer weather, that same child might get extremely dirty and not care how they look because no one cares for them.

An older child may be starting to break the limits. What happens if?… Climbing really high trees, racing friends on their bikes, hitting things, and hurting others.

Seeking Roughness in People

An older child may start hanging out with friends who are not appropriate and experiment with drugs and alcohol. They might start spending time with other families and staying out as long as possible. Avoiding going home to their abusers at any cost.

The Self-harming Child

A child is seen torturing themselves (self-harming) with sticks or tools (like knives), making their hands bleed, and developing blisters and bruises on purpose.

This is a big, desperate cry for help. This means the child is on the verge of giving up in a downward spiral of hate and shame for itself and not just the abuser.

The Child Actor

A child acting out the abuse itself anywhere is obviously a massive red flag for anyone, but sometimes this could be more subtle and disguised in their normal play. Like abusing dolls, teddies, or pets, even insects or anything that could be restrained and hurt.

Overall Body Indicators

An abused child may seem strangely jittery, tense and may even use rigid robotic movements and hyper alert of their surroundings. This would be particularly apparent during a change in routine.

Head Constant Aches and Stomach Pains

A child suddenly developing chronic headaches or feeling sick is another sign that all is not well. A child might feel threatened and become paranoid by keeping their eyes on a swivel. These children feel desperately unsafe in their normal environment.

Physical Changes

A child suffering sexual abuse may struggle to sit down if they are a girl. They may suffer from chronic vaginal pain when going to the bathroom. This child may avoid going to the bathroom and ignore their bodily signals, and have wet accidents.

Testing Behavior

An abused child may often copy friends’ rough behavior to see the reactions they get from adults. This child may never have been given boundaries and may have to learn what is good and bad behavior.

Another behavior is to become very angry and be rough with toys, animals, or even their peers. These are called temper tantrums.

Rejecting Common Food Types

A child might suddenly start rejecting certain foods that remind them of sexual abuse like cream, custard, mayonnaise and yogurts.

The People Pleaser

A child who is being abused gets very good at reading people around them and deflecting attention away from them. They may try to seek affirmation from adults that they are ok and “been good”. This child is seeking approval of adults.

Fear and Terror

A child might suddenly get terrified of something, which reminds them of their abuser/s. This might seem completely harmless to everyone else.

A child might start incessant crying or become hysterical over nothing or suddenly become upset at the sight of men with beards or someone with glasses.

All these coping mechanisms are called by the professionals as a “Fight / flight / freeze / Fawn” state of being.

It is a survival state.

This is what happens when the brain’s sympathetic nervous system becomes overactive, which makes the body go into a “fight / flight / fawn and freeze” state. The Amygdala part of the brain becomes hyperactive under the conditions of extreme stress like traumatic experiences. The memory gets “stuck in this part of the brain in vivid detail until it is triggered years later.

My name is Lizzy. I’m a trauma survivor, a wife, a mom, a teacher, and an author.

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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 adaptation is not random. It is a survival response.

In unstable environments, children learn fast. The nervous system prioritizes threat detection and response. When caregivers are dysregulated, depressed, addicted, violent, or chronically overwhelmed, the child’s brain shifts toward hypervigilance. Research in developmental neuroscience shows that chronic stress in early life alters stress-response systems, especially the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. The child becomes alert to tone shifts, facial micro-expressions, pacing, silence. They track volatility because volatility predicts danger.

From that tracking, a rule forms: safety comes from usefulness. “If I can anticipate the need, reduce the tension, fix the problem, manage the mood, prevent the blow-up, I stay safer.” That is not pathology. That is adaptive intelligence under pressure.

The difficulty is not in the childhood adaptation. The difficulty is in what it builds and what it does not.

When a child is regulating adults, no one is consistently regulating the child. Secure attachment develops through repeated experiences of being soothed, protected, and mirrored. Parentification interrupts that sequence. The child may appear competent, articulate, even unusually mature. Internally, developmental tasks related to identity formation, self-directed initiation, and safe dependency remain incomplete.

By adulthood, the presentation can be impressive.

• Cognitive and emotional insight
• High responsibility tolerance
• Crisis competence
• Social perceptiveness

Each of these traits has adaptive value. Many parentified adults succeed in demanding professions. They perform well under pressure. They anticipate complications before others see them. In forensic settings, emergency medicine, law enforcement, trauma work, or high-conflict environments, that vigilance can look like leadership. The outside sees strength. The nervous system knows it as vigilance.

I was once described as an over-achiever. A workaholic. Driven. I was even told I had an “insane work ethic.” As an adult, I am proud of that discipline. It built a great career, drove me through 14 years of college, and created a life. It created stability. It produced measurable results.

But the origin matters.

That drive did not begin as ambition. It began as adaptation. I was a parentified child. The work ethic people admire was forged in vigilance. The self-sufficiency they praise was learned early because there was no one consistently stabilizing me. Success did not grow from ease. It grew from necessity. It was a difficult path. Productive. Impressive. Sustainable on the outside. Costly on the inside.

• What looks like ambition is often vigilance.
• What looks like strength is often hyper-responsibility.
• What looks like maturity is often early exposure to instability.

Parentification accelerates responsibility, but it does not build internal structure.

One of the most confusing adult outcomes is what I refer to as the action gap. This is the distance between insight and initiation. In Love Without Rescue (2026), I examine how this early role reversal matures into adult over-functioning and what I call the action gap.

Parentified adults often understand exactly what needs to happen. They can articulate long-term risks. They can map consequences with accuracy. Yet when it is time to begin something self-directed, especially something not driven by crisis, there is hesitation or delay.

• Insight without initiation
• Planning without execution
• Intention without movement

Parentified adults often understand exactly what needs to happen. They can articulate long-term risks. They can map consequences with accuracy. Yet when it is time to begin something self-directed, especially something not driven by crisis, there is hesitation or delay.

This is not laziness, defiance, or lack of intelligence.

In childhood, action was triggered by urgency. A parent escalates. A bill goes unpaid. A sibling is in distress. Movement follows crisis. The nervous system learns to mobilize under threat, not under calm conditions. Long-term planning requires a baseline of internal safety. Many parentified children never experienced safety without performance.

From a trauma science standpoint, this tracks.

Chronic early stress sensitizes threat-detection networks in the amygdala and alters connectivity with the prefrontal cortex. Executive functions such as sustained initiation and future-oriented planning depend on a regulated stress response. When activation is the norm, stillness can feel unfamiliar or unsafe.

There is also the identity component.  Worth linked to usefulness. Care linked to performance. Belonging linked to stabilizing others. If usefulness is the organizing principle of attachment, then self-directed goals that benefit only the individual can feel selfish or destabilizing. Receiving care can trigger discomfort. Rest can feel like negligence. Being supported can feel unsafe.

In clinical practice and forensic interviews, I have seen this pattern across socioeconomic and cultural lines. It does not require overt abuse. It can arise in homes with chronic illness, parental depression, addiction, unresolved trauma, or simply prolonged emotional unavailability. The child steps in. The system stabilizes just enough. The adaptation is reinforced.

By adulthood, two patterns often coexist. 

• Over-functioning for others
• Under-initiation for self

The same person who can manage a family crisis, organize complex logistics, or perform under extreme pressure may struggle to begin a personal project with no external deadline. Observers are confused.

How can someone so capable stall?

Because capability developed in response to instability. Self-directed development did not.

The phrase “grew up fast” is often offered as praise. Developmentally, it signals compression. Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development assume progressive resolution of autonomy, initiative, and identity tasks. When a child’s primary task becomes adult stabilization, those stages are rerouted. Competence may increase. Internal coherence may lag.

None of this is destiny. Neuroplasticity persists across the lifespan. Attachment patterns can shift through corrective relational experiences. Trauma-informed therapies, including modalities that target somatic regulation and cognitive restructuring, have demonstrated measurable change in stress-response patterns.

The work, however, is different from what parentified adults already know. They do not need more responsibility. They know responsibility. They need experiences of being supported without earning it, initiating action without crisis pressure, tolerating imperfect outcomes, and separating worth from usefulness

That developmental repair cannot be outsourced. It also cannot be forced by others stepping in to close gaps. Ownership builds initiation. Repeated self-directed action, even small and imperfect, builds internal structure.

Parentification likely preserved survival. It also may have produced competence that others admire, but it did not replace the need for secure attachment and regulated development. The adult task is not to erase strength. It is to decouple strength from vigilance.

When usefulness is no longer the price of safety, identity can reorganize around choice rather than threat. That shift is gradual. It is measurable. It is grounded in established trauma science and developmental research. Parentification does not end at childhood. It matures into adult patterns that look functional and often are.

The cost is hidden in the nervous system and in the gap between knowing and beginning. Recognizing the pattern is not self-indulgence. It is diagnostic clarity.

Clarity is where restructuring starts.

Sources

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.).

Anda, R. F., Felitti, V. J., Bremner, J. D., Walker, J. D., Whitfield, C., Perry, B. D., Dube, S. R., & Giles, W. H. (2006). The enduring effects of abuse and related adverse experiences in childhood. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 256(3), 174–186.

Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton.

Gunnar, M. R., & Quevedo, K. (2007). The neurobiology of stress and development. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 145–173.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery. Basic Books.

Hooper, L. M. (2007). The application of attachment theory and family systems theory to the phenomenon of parentification. Family Journal, 15(3), 217–223.

McEwen, B. S. (2007). Physiology and neurobiology of stress and adaptation. Physiological Reviews, 87(3), 873–904.

Perry, B. D., & Szalavitz, M. (2006). The boy who was raised as a dog. Basic Books.

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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