Summer can also carry expectations of being busy, extra social, and happy. That being said, seeing that happiness in others can sometimes leave trauma survivors feeling isolated or as though they are somehow falling behind their peers; left behind.

Yet healing is not a competition, and there is no “right way” to experience any season if you think about it.

Remember, it is okay if your summer looks different; perhaps quieter, slower, or otherwise from that of what society generally might expect.

Your healing doesn’t have to look like someone else’s. It’s not about matching anyone energy, spead, or resilience this summer. 

On some days, progress may simply mean saying no to someone, taking a quiet walk, watching a sunset, or just allowing yourself to rest without feeling guilty for it.

Your peace may (and likely does) look less like what heals someone else and probably more like what brings you feelings of safety, comfort, restoration, pride, progress, or just calm.

Healing isn’t found within the realm of a single season. It’s something built with grit and grace overtime; a lifelong journey, often requiring ongoing attention and self-care; perhaps one day at a time.

Each small moment of peace you can enjoy absolutely matters. Over time, these small victories can accumulate, leading to profound and potentially meaningful improvements in healing and overall well-being.

Remember that your journey is your own and living at your own pace should not make you feel guilty. At the very least, it is actually one thing you can absolutely control.

Be well.

Original Image Disclaimer: “The image used is an original creative work produced by the author through personal conceptual design, imagination, and use of digital generation and editing tools. Any resemblance to existing works, individuals, or copyrighted material is purely coincidental.”

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

Moments later I was led into a room down a dimly-lit hallway where the heavy boot treads of the large officer in front of me echoed off the concrete walls. My heart beat heavy in my throat and I desperately needed water. I dutifully sat down at the table, as instructed, picked at the bleeding cuticles on my fingers, and the officer asked me what I wanted to report.

I looked up at the man, mid-40’s, thick brown hair, mustache, watery blue eyes, and tried to explain that I ran away from my mother who was cruel. I told him that she was critical, mean, neglectful, made me feel like I was useless and a burden, and I couldn’t take living there any longer. It sounded stupid to say it out loud, and after the man wrote in his book, and closed it, he asked a simple, loaded question, “do you have any bruises?”

How do you tell someone that inside you’re a festering pool of pus and blood and pain? No one could see the injuries that were done to me over the course of my childhood. I didn’t even have the words to explain how I felt to the officer sitting in front of me that day who told me there was nothing he could do if I didn’t have bruises, welts, or other marks from physical abuse.

Emotional abuse isn’t something most people would notice. Often, especially around other people, it’s silent, subtle, and chronic.

It includes, but isn’t limited to: constant criticism, belittling, ignoring your emotions, shaming, mocking, or dismissing your needs. It can also include withholding affection, the silent treatment, emotional unpredictability, children expected to act like a parent (parentification), being made to feel guilty over things you cannot control, pitting you against other family members (especially siblings and the other parent in separation situations) or pitting them against you.

Back then, in the 1980’s and the 1990’s, therapists didn’t have knowledge about emotional trauma and its relationship to complex traumatic childhood experiences. They didn’t have training to notice it. As a matter of fact, children who were in therapy who had the strength to tell the truth (the fight response in trauma) were likely ignored. That’s what happened to me, repeatedly. No one listened, no one heard, and no one helped.

Emotional pain matters. It mattered then, and it matters now.

Many survivors think that other people have had it worse than they did, and perhaps that’s true in some cases, but your pain matters anyway. Emotional abuse is invisible, but its impact is severe. The scars it leaves are difficult to see to outsiders, but take a very long time to heal for victims and affects their ability to deal with emotions and have healthy relationships for the rest of their lives.

For many kids, their brains normalize their environments. So, what they experience, even if it’s horrible, abusive, and just plain messed up, to them, it’s just ‘normal’. For kids with emotionally abusive caregivers, their survival depends on loyalty to the parent, not analysis and reflection. It could be very dangerous for a child to recognize that how they are being treated is abuse, especially if the child acted on their realization (ask me how I know).

If a child doesn’t have a flight or fawn or freeze response to their trauma and, like me, was/is a fighter by nature, then their abuser might have said things like this:

“You think your life is bad?”

“You’re too sensitive“

“Everything I do is for you“

“I’m the best [mom] or [dad]“

“This is discipline“

“This is tough love“

“You owe me everything for what I’ve done for you and what I put up with“

“You’re ungrateful“

When people who were emotionally abused grow up, sometimes they recognize that things were not right, but sometimes they don’t. Some people, like me, knew it all along and had no one to save them from the torment. Sometimes people are still drinking that poison-spiked Kool-Aid mommy made and smiling while drinking it because they don’t know any better. Adulthood should bring distance between you and the abuser, and that distance might allow you to see clearly what really happened, especially if you’re experiencing relationship, communication, and emotional issues.

It is very painful to realize you have been abused, and your abuser will not admit what they did, will not admit the way they treated you was wrong, and if you even bring it up, they’ll likely gaslight you and make you feel like it’s your fault. Best to just leave them out of your journey of recognition and healing.

Your feelings are real. Your experiences are valid. Healing starts with acknowledging what happened and accepting that you deserved love then, and you deserve love now. No matter where you are, you are not too late to start healing.

Suggested resources:

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD (book)

Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jonice Webb, PhD (book)

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker (book)

Strathearn, L., Giannotti, M., Mills, R., Kisely, S., Najman, J., & Abajobir, A. (2020). Long‑term cognitive, psychological, and health outcomes associated with child abuse and neglect. Pediatrics, 146(4), e20200438. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-0438 (article)

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

Then the crisis ends. The house gets quiet, the phone stops ringing, the danger passes, and nobody needs anything for five minutes. That is when the survivor starts to feel wrong. Not relieved, peaceful, or restored. Wrong.

The body may feel restless, irritable, nauseated, flat, guilty, useless, wired, or suddenly exhausted. The person who looked steady under pressure may now struggle to answer a simple text, choose dinner, fold laundry, or sit still without scanning the room for a problem to solve.

From the outside, that can look confusing. It can even look contradictory, but it’s not. A trauma-adapted nervous system may know how to mobilize, just not how to come down.

Crisis Gives the Body a Job

Crisis is not pleasant, but for some survivors it is familiar. The body understands crisis. There is a task, a threat, a chain of demand. Assess, move, predict, prevent, contain, perform, endure, but by all means, do not crumble. Not yet, anyway.

That kind of mobilization can become deeply rehearsed. A survivor who grew up around volatility, addiction, violence, neglect, medical chaos, emotional instability, or chronic uncertainty may have learned early that survival depended on fast response. Not later – now.

That child may have learned to hear footsteps differently. Track tone. Know when a parent was about to turn. Sense when a room was changing. Become useful before anyone asked. Stay composed because someone else’s instability took up all the available space.

By adulthood, that adaptation may look like competence. And in many situations, it is. The problem is that crisis competence is not the same as nervous-system health. A person can function well under threat and still become dysregulated when threat is gone.

That is one reason trauma survivors are so often misunderstood. People see performance and mistake it for wellness, see composure and mistake it for ease, and see crisis skill and assume the survivor is fine. The survivor may not be fine. Instead, the survivor may simply be operating in the state their body knows best.

Why Some Survivors Are Better With Other People’s Crises

Some trauma survivors become unusually good at stabilizing other people under pressure. They can sit with panic, rage, grief, shock, suicidal despair, family chaos, law enforcement contact, medical fear, or emotional collapse without losing the room. That does not always mean they are calm inside, they just know how to function while activated.

Other people’s crises provide structure. There is an external person to focus on, an immediate problem to contain, and a role the survivor understands. The body has a job, the mind has somewhere to go, and the survivor may even feel calmer because the emergency is outside of their own life.

But their own crisis can be very different. When the fear is personal, when the uncertainty belongs to them, when they cannot control the outcome, the old system may flood too fast for skill to reach it. The same person who can talk someone else through terror may become overwhelmed by their own anxiety because there is no clean professional or emotional distance. They are not observing the storm from the doorway. They are in the eye of the storm. That can produce shame, especially in people who have been the steady one for others. They may think, “How can I help everyone else and fall apart over my own life?”

But helping others in crisis and regulating one’s own threat system are different tasks. One uses skill, structure, role clarity, and external focus. The other requires the body to tolerate uncertainty without trying to seize control of it. For many trauma survivors, that is the most difficult task.

Rest Can Feel Like Exposure

Rest requires something crisis does not, it requires letting go, at least a little. That sounds simple unless a person’s history taught them that letting go even a smidgeon was dangerous.

For some trauma survivors, the bad thing did not happen while they were guarded. It happened when they trusted, slept, laughed too loud, asked for help, stopped watching, believed the apology, or thought the good day meant the home was safe. The body can remember that order of events even when the mind tries to reason with it.

So when life becomes calm, the nervous system may not register relief – it may register exposure. This is why a survivor may feel more comfortable during emergencies than during peace. Emergency activates the old skills while peace removes the job. Without the job, the survivor may feel unprotected.

That does not mean they want chaos. That accusation gets thrown around too easily. “You must like drama.” “You’re addicted to stress.” “You don’t know how to be happy.” Sometimes those comments catch a visible behavior but miss the entire internal process within it. The survivor is not always seeking drama. The survivor may be seeking orientation. Crisis gives the body a map. Rest gives the body a situation it does not yet know how to handle.

What am I supposed to do when nothing is wrong? For a well-regulated person, that may sound strange. For a trauma survivor, it can be the whole problem.

Hyperarousal Does Not Clock Out Politely

Post-traumatic stress often includes arousal and reactivity symptoms: being easily startled, feeling tense or on guard, having trouble concentrating, sleep disturbance, irritability, and sometimes risky or destructive behavior. These symptoms can interfere with sleep, eating, attention, and daily functioning. That helps explain why a body living in chronic arousal does not power down just because the calendar is clear.

The survivor may be sitting on the couch, but the body is still preparing. The muscles may stay slightly braced, the jaw may stay tight, the ears may keep listening, the stomach may stay unsettled, and the mind may search for what has been missed. This is not always conscious.

A person may say, “I don’t know why I can’t relax,” and that may be accurate, but the reaction can occur outside of deliberate thought.

Complex trauma can add another layer because it is not only about fear symptoms. Complex PTSD is also associated with trouble regulating emotion, a damaged sense of self, shame, guilt, and difficulty with closeness. That means rest may not merely feel physically unfamiliar. It may stir identity, worth, attachment, and old survival roles.

A survivor may feel lazy or guilty when resting, selfish when unavailable, anxious when nobody needs them, suspicious when someone is kind, or worthless when they are not producing, fixing, preventing, explaining, absorbing impact, or making themselves useful. That is survival identity that has not yet been allowed to retire.

Being Needed Can Become a False Form of Safety

Some trauma survivors feel safest when they are useful. Usefulness gives them purpose… a a reason to stay in the room. It may reduce the risk of rejection, criticism, abandonment, or attack. This is especially common for survivors who were trained to manage adult emotions when they were too young to carry that job. If a child learned that the household became safer when they were pleasing, quiet, competent, funny, helpful, invisible, impressive, or emotionally available, that child may become an adult who confuses usefulness with security.

Rest disrupts that arrangement. If the survivor is resting, they are not managing. If they are not managing, they may feel replaceable. If they feel replaceable, they may feel unsafe. That is how old conditioning hides inside adult productivity.

This person may be praised for being reliable, or called strong, capable, selfless, disciplined, mature, or “the one who always handles things.” Some of that praise may be accurate, but it can also keep the wound alive. A person can be admired for the same adaptation that is quietly wearing them down. They can be praised for never needing help because needing help once went badly. They can be trusted with everyone else’s crisis because no one has noticed they do not know how to have their own.

The Crash After the Crisis

A common trauma response is delayed collapse. The survivor gets through the emergency, the funeral, the court date, the family gathering, the hospital visit, the work deadline, the confrontation, the move, the holiday, the child’s crisis, the medical scare. Then afterward, the body takes the bill.

That bill may look like exhaustion, irritability, crying, numbness, insomnia, pain, stomach trouble, headaches, shutdown, or a sudden sense of dread. The survivor may feel embarrassed because they “handled it fine” while it was happening. But handling is not the same as processing.

During crisis, the body may postpone feeling in order to function. That postponement is not free because once the demand drops, what was suppressed often comes forward. The survivor may not be reacting only to the quiet moment. They may be reacting to everything they could not afford to feel while performing competence.

This is why some survivors need recovery time after events that other people experience as ordinary. A birthday party, a work meeting, a family dinner, a phone call with a difficult relative, a doctor appointment, or a good visit with someone they love. Good things can still require regulation because those events can still involve noise, attention, expectation, emotional exposure, transitions, decisions, sensory load, and social interpretation. A trauma survivor may enjoy the event and still crash afterward because the body worked hard to stay present.

Rest Has to Be Relearned

Telling a trauma survivor to “just relax” is usually useless. Worse, it can sound like another demand. Rest cannot be forced through scolding, it has to be rebuilt through repeated experiences of safe downshifting. A survivor may not begin with meditation, silence, long vacations, or an entire unscheduled day. Those may be too much at first since the nervous system may interpret too much openness as danger.

Rest may need to start smaller such as:

• Sitting with a warm drink for 5 minutes without multitasking
• Letting one non-urgent message wait
• Not explaining a boundary beyond what is necessary
• Taking a short walk without turning it into performance
• Leaving one harmless task unfinished until tomorrow
• Practicing quiet while keeping enough structure to stay grounded

Some survivors need structured rest before they can tolerate open rest. A puzzle, a familiar show, light cleaning with music, watering plants, stretching, cooking something simple, or sitting outside with a defined time limit may be more regulating than being told to “do nothing.” Doing nothing can feel like falling through the floor when a person’s nervous system has no internal template for safe stillness. The goal is not to shame the survivor for needing structure, it’s to help the body discover that not every quiet moment is a setup.

Safe Relationships Make Room for Decompression

People close to trauma survivors need to understand something practical. The survivor may not collapse because they are unhappy with you, they may collapse because they finally feel safe enough to stop performing. A survivor who comes home from a difficult day and goes quiet may not be rejecting the household. They may be trying not to come apart. A survivor who needs solitude after a family event may not be cold. They may be recovering from sensory and emotional load. A survivor who becomes irritable after a crisis may not be ungrateful that things improved. Their system may still be processing what happened.

Trauma can explain reactions but it does not give a person unlimited permission to mistreat others. Accurate interpretation still helps because it allows the survivor to take responsibility without being mislabeled. It lets loved ones avoid taking every withdrawal personally. It gives both sides a better starting place.

Sources

Cloitre, M., Shevlin, M., Brewin, C. R., Bisson, J. I., Roberts, N. P., Maercker, A., Karatzias, T., & Hyland, P. (2018). The International Trauma Questionnaire: Development of a self-report measure of ICD-11 PTSD and complex PTSD. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 138(6), 536–546.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phot 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

As someone with a history of trauma—and someone who has committed deeply to her own inner work—I recognize these patterns not just professionally, but personally. I see them often in the women I work with and I know how confusing, disorienting, and at times defeating this phase of life can feel.

My hope in sharing this is simple:
That if this is you, you feel less alone…
Less defeated…
And more informed than ever before.

So much of what’s happening during this time flies beneath our healing radar. It can feel like something has suddenly gone wrong—when in reality, something deeper is being revealed.

I’m deeply grateful to the doctors and researchers who are beginning to take both a closer and broader look at women’s health, trauma, and healing. Their work is helping to bring language and understanding to experiences many women have silently carried for years.

So lets begin …

There’s a sentence that deserves to be read slowly—maybe even more than once:

“Perimenopause doesn’t create dysregulation.” — Dr. Aimie Apigian

It reveals what was already there—because the body can no longer buffer it the way it once did.

As a 50-year-old woman who has been through a lot—and has done a significant amount of healing work—I began to notice changes about six years into my perimenopause phase.

So my research began.

And I now feel it’s essential for all women to have a deeper understanding of this topic. Because for many, this realization doesn’t arrive as clarity.

It arrives as overwhelm.

Yes, the more recognizable shifts begin to occur:

• Sleep becomes unreliable
• Moods feel unpredictable
• Anxiety rises without warning
• A body that once felt manageable begins to feel unfamiliar—sometimes even unsafe

[Link to free neuro-somatic anxiety workshop: https://youtu.be/-7GnYau1Oos]

And somewhere beneath all of that, a quieter question surfaces:

“Why does this feel like more than hormones?”

As Dr. Aimie Apigian shares:

“Think of how you have adapted to survive your life…
All those adaptations were intended to help you survive at that time…
But then the heat gets turned up.”

Perimenopause is that turning point. Not because something is going wrong but because something long-held is no longer being buffered. If you’d like to explore this lens more deeply, her Biology of Trauma Podcast, Episode 168: The Biology Behind Hormones, Trauma, and Menopause offers an important foundation for this conversation.

When Biology Stops Buffering

When Biology Stops Buffering

As estrogen declines, it takes with it key neurochemicals that have quietly supported your ability to cope:

• Serotonin — mood stability, emotional resilience
• Dopamine — motivation, reward, drive
• GABA — calm; the braking system for stress
• Acetylcholine — supports memory, learning, and nervous system communication

For years—often decades—these helped hold things together. They softened stress, muted emotional intensity, and allowed survival patterns to run in the background without overwhelming you.

But as these levels shift, the system loses its buffering capacity.

The shock absorbers thin out.

And suddenly, what once felt manageable becomes overwhelming.

Not because you are weaker—
but because your biology is no longer compensating for what your nervous system has been carrying.

When Survival Strategies Get Stress-Tested

By now, you may recognize your dominant survival pattern—even though it can shift depending on the person, place, stress level, or sensory load:

• Fight → irritation, control, intensity
• Flight → anxiety, busyness, overthinking
• Freeze → shutdown, fatigue, numbness
• Fawn → over-giving, loss of boundaries

In perimenopause, these patterns don’t disappear.

They intensify—until they can no longer run unchecked.

Perimenopause is not a test of who you are (not that you need any more tests).
But it does become a reflection of how you’ve adapted.

Every survival strategy you’ve relied on is quietly being asked:

“Can you still hold this… without the same biological support?”

And often, the answer is no.

Survival strategies are not the problem.

They were intelligent, necessary responses to earlier, often intolerable experiences.

But if they haven’t been integrated—or updated—science now shows they can be pushed beyond their limits during this phase.

You may notice:

• Hyper-independence becoming exhausting rather than empowering
• People-pleasing shifting into irritation or quiet resentment
• Perfectionism becoming unsustainable, with rising anxiety
• Emotional suppression no longer working
• Freeze states deepening into brain fog, fatigue, or disconnection

These patterns carried you—until your system could no longer sustain them.

As Dr. Apigian states:

“All survival strategies get stress-tested.”

Why Hot Flushes (and Cold Flushes) Feel So Different

Image Supplied by Author; Created By AI.

Why Hot (and Cold) Flushes Feel So Different

Hot and cold flushes are often described as purely hormonal—but in the body, they are also nervous system events.

They are part of the thermoregulatory system, governed by the autonomic nervous system—the same system involved in your stress response.

• A hot flush involves dilation of blood vessels → heat, flushing, sweating
• A cold flush involves constriction → chills, shakiness, depletion

These are not random. They are deeply connected to your nervous system state.

For some women, a flush is brief and tolerable.

For others, it becomes an agonic experience—a moment of intense internal distress where the body interprets the surge as threat:

“Something is wrong. I’m not safe.”

This difference matters.

Because the same physiological event lands very differently depending on your baseline regulation:

• Regulated system → rises, peaks, resolves
• Survival-patterned system → amplifies, loops, escalates

These are not random. They are nervous system events. If you’re like me you might only experience cold flushes, I call them the ‘death chills’, I also have Raynaud’s Syndrome, so in milliseconds my whole body can go into a full on survival stress response, which [thankfully because of the work I do] I know how to regulate and recover from quickly.

The Missing Piece in the Conversation

We’re hearing more about menopause than ever before:

Hormones. Supplements. Sleep. HRT.

But what’s often missing is the deeper layer:

• The nervous system
• The impact of trauma and chronic stress
• The role of emotional regulation
• The body’s learned relationship to safety and sensation

Without this lens, many women are left believing:

“This is just what happens.”

But clinically, they are seeing something more nuanced:

How it happens depends largely on the state of your nervous system.

How it happens can largely depend on the state of your nervous system. Hormone Replacement Therapy can be incredibly helpful when administered to the individual as an individual. It can stabilize fluctuations, reduce intensity, and create breathing room. But it is not a full resolution. Because what is surfacing during this time may not have begun during perimenopause. What is stored becomes more visible now.

Working With the Body: Sequencing Matters

Trauma changes how you experience your body—especially your ability to interpret internal signals (interoception).

It is not just psychological or physiological.

It is also sensory.

For some, signals become too quiet:

• numbness
• disconnection
• flatness

For others, too loud:

• anxiety
• heat surges
• hyper-reactivity

Both are adaptations.

And both can be worked with—but how you work with them matters.

A Sequenced Approach

Healing follows a natural order:

Brainstem → Safety and regulation
Sensation → learning the language of the body
Deeper processing → when readiness is present

Healing is less about time—and more about readiness.

And within that:

• Sensation — what you feel
• Perception — what you make it mean
• Response — how you respond with capacity and choice

In survival mode, this sequence is disrupted.

Healing gently restores it—not by forcing release, but by building capacity at the level of sensation first.

Providing Biological Support: Where to Begin

This is not about doing more.

It’s about supporting your system differently.

1. Stabilize before analyzing
   Support your body first—through grounding, hydration, rest, and gentle movement
2. Start with small, safe sensations
   Neutral or pleasant cues: breath, feet, support, connection
3. Track your patterns
   Notice hyperarousal (overwhelm) and hypoarousal (shutdown)
4. Support daily regulation
   Movement, nature, sleep, relational safety
5. Go at the pace of your body
   Not urgency. Not expectation.

A Rite of Passage, Not a Breakdown

Many traditional cultures understood this phase as a transition—not a decline.

A time when what was unfinished rises.

Not to overwhelm you—
but to be completed.

If this feels like too much at times…

It may be because your system is finally saying:

“We can’t keep doing it the old way anymore.”

And that moment—
is also a threshold.

If this speaks to where you are:

You are not alone.

And more importantly—

There is a way to work with what’s surfacing,
rather than feeling overtaken by it.

Connect with me:
https://www.handsoftimehealing.com/about

RISE to WISE | 1:1 Healing |Neuro-Somatic Stress and Emotional Integration
Through the Listening Lab™ & CoreNeuroCare©

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

Some children become adults before anyone notices they were children. They learn early how to pay attention. They notice tension before anyone speaks about it. They become skilled at reading the room, anticipating problems, and adapting to whatever the moment requires. Adults praise them for being mature, dependable, and capable. Few people stop to consider what it took for a child to become that responsible.

Years later, those same children often become highly successful adults. They are leaders, entrepreneurs, clinicians, first responders, executives, and experts in their fields. They are trusted with difficult decisions and complex challenges because they have spent much of their lives learning how to navigate uncertainty.

Many of us recognize this story because we have lived it ourselves. We learned how to carry responsibility. We learned how to stay composed when others were overwhelmed. We learned how to solve problems, anticipate needs, and keep moving forward when circumstances became difficult. Those skills served us well. They helped us build careers, earn trust, and create success.

I have spent much of my life in environments where composure mattered. As an athlete, business leader, emergency responder, and crisis mitigation professional, staying calm under pressure was expected. That expectation followed me everywhere: in the gym, the boardroom, the back of an ambulance, and virtual meetings with employees half a world away.

What I eventually came to understand is that I was exceptionally good at being the responsible one.

I was far less skilled at simply being human. Sitting on a beach. Taking a day off. Letting someone else carry the burden for a while. Even when life was calm, part of me remained responsible for everyone around me.

Many high performers know exactly what I mean. We know how to show up for others. We know how to handle responsibility. We know how to keep going. Yet, there are moments when we quietly wonder why life feels so much heavier than it should. We may be respected thought leaders in our field, accomplished, and trusted by others, all while feeling completely disconnected from parts of ourselves when the workday is over.

For some of us, responsibility became more than a role. It became part of our identity because it was a survival mechanism. Being dependable does not feel like something we learned. It feels like something we have always been.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORD OF CAUTION:

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

Only the estranged son or daughter holds this reliable information.

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

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

Photo Credit: Unsplash

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

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

The child learns through repetition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Unsplash

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

You Can’t Run Away From Your Own Head

Human beings are like an iceberg. We go through life sharing only the pieces of ourselves that we want people to see. But there’s so much more going on inside.

Isaac Newton’s third law states that: “for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.” I think that this “law of motion” can be applied to human beings too.

Think about it.

For everything we say, think, or do, there is a corresponding reaction. In terms of Stress on the body, this is true. When something traumatic happens to us or to someone near us, we react to defend ourselves.

It’s a defense mechanism to protect us from harm.

In victims of traumatic stress, there is a physiological change that happens inside our bodies.

I described the five F’s of behavior in response to traumatic events in my last two articles. Today, I want to explain what those behaviors are like in real life.

There’s always going to be a difference between academic study of trauma and for those who live with PTSD or Complex-PTSD every single day.

I fall under the second category, and I can help other survivors because I have lived with Complex PTSD for most of my life.

It’s far from easy, but as time goes by, things have gotten easier.

I often feel like I have an anchor holding me back on a bad day or night. I want to keep going, ignore whatever’s eating me, but I can’t.

Sometimes, you have to face what’s eating you, and it usually means to stop whatever it is you’re doing and listen to your body.

The world keeps spinning whether you want it to or not when you’re struggling. It’s worth having a few coping techniques stowed away for a trigger day.

I have these triggers all the time, but even my closest colleagues have no idea that I’m falling apart some days.

I’ve gotten very good at hiding how I really feel.

Living with Traumatic Stress

Traumatic events change the way you look at yourself and the world. Your brain can go into overdrive, and it can make you hyper-aware of everything around you.

This can cause some big changes in your behavior.

Living with trauma can feel like your world has been ripped away from under your feet. Nothing feels the same anymore, and you are plunged into a world of constant fear, anxiety, and overwhelming situations.

Living with trauma can feel like a constant battle to function. Some days, it’s hard to get out of bed. Taking a shower and eating can become a huge battle because self-care is the last thing on your mind.

It’s hard to face your friends and go out when the stress from trauma is clouding your thoughts and motivation.

Holding down a job can become impossible when constant nightmares and trauma memories happen, destroying your focus and memory.

Imagine if you had an epic nightmare of being murdered or tortured. Your brain is reliving parts of your past, which is showing a 4D movie without a pause button.

How could you function at work the next day?

Imagine a friend is waving a knife around while talking animatedly over a kid’s birthday cake. It’s an exciting event with kids running around the room and adults having fun talking to each other, but you’re frozen staring at that knife as the room dulls. The voices disappear, and you’re pulled back in time to a trauma memory, hijacked by your own brain.

As you come out of the flashback, it’s hard not to react without causing a scene.

You can suffer from brain fog, mood swings, and find change difficult.

Some days, you want to conquer everything all at once, and you feel fantastic, like the bad days never existed.

It’s confusing, right? It’s no wonder people call trauma survivors mentally ill, but it’s far from the truth. Trauma survivors have been hurt in the most profound way, and that hurt has to come out eventually.

Some survivors can flip between hyper-vigilance and dissociation in a few minutes. Imagine living like that every single day?

Everyone reacts differently to traumatic events because of life experience, resilience, and if you have a support system or not.

It’s important to understand that everyone’s healing journey is different. Some survivors heal quickly, but others can struggle all their lives.

Behaviors Caused by Traumatic Stress

Feeling on edge and scanning your surroundings for threats and danger.

Irritability, anger and withdrawing from people.

Avoiding situations that are too painful because they trigger memories.

Feeling worthless, ashamed and distorting our opinions of ourselves and others.

Social situations and cues can feel fragmented and cause problems in forming and keeping friendships.

Anxiety and vulnerability

Depression

Mixed emotions that lead to confusion in situations.

Trust issues because of the fear of being exposed to more pain.

What Help is Available for Trauma survivors?

Therapy — Seeing a therapist can help you find the tools to handle triggers and take control back through coping mechanisms.

Support network — Having a strong network of friends around you.

Self-care – is important to live a healthy life. Things like exercising, mindfulness, relaxation and yoga, and doing a hobby can do wonders to reduce your stress levels.

Medication — Can be helpful for people who are struggling to sleep and those who suffer from anxiety.

Education — Learning about Trauma and how it can affect you enables you to take charge of your healing journey.

Change — Be willing to heal the root cause of your trauma to move forward in your life.

Living with trauma affects every aspect of your life. You’re hurting in the most profound way, and you can’t ignore it forever. It’s time you put yourself first.

I did.

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:

https://ko-fi.com/elizabe69245484

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

What if my nervous system is so damaged from childhood trauma that no amount of therapy and practice will reteach it a sense of safety in places and situations that trigger me?

Is it possible for a nervous system to be so severely damaged by trauma that no amount of therapeutic techniques help 100 percent? 

These are questions spinning around in my brain regularly, and I’m now speaking them because I can’t push them down anymore.

I was suppressing these thoughts because I wanted to keep up hope that I could “fix” my nervous system and repair damage done by trauma. I want to have faith in the power of neuroplasticity. None of this is to say that nothing has helped me. I have seen progress in building up some resilience.

However, there is so much more progress to be made, that I grow frustrated at the rate healing takes. Being in an intensive outpatient program (IOP) has shown me how much work I need to do on myself, and quite frankly, it’s overwhelming. The amount of work is dizzying, and I can’t always seem to get a grip on myself when I think about all the therapy and practice I need to do.

 There are so many techniques and modalities for trauma, and through the IOP I have received a taste of a couple that seem really helpful, such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and somatic exercises.  DBT and somatic work are modalities that I have been wanting to do for a while, but it’s so hard to find therapists who take insurance for somatic therapy.

I’m cracking down on practicing my meditation, somatic movement, breath work, and emotional regulation skills. It becomes overwhelming, and I want to cave under it all at times. There are so many facets of my trauma and mental health in general that need to be addressed, it almost feels as though I need a specialized therapist for each one.  

For instance, I noticed the other day that while doing a body scan, I struggle with body scans, because I struggle to be in my body. I don’t love my body. In fact, I don’t even feel neutral about my body. I have so much dislike for my body that goes way back to my childhood and conditioning, that I don’t even know where to begin. When I talk to therapists about this, they don’t seem to have the best of answers or to be the most comfortable talking about the topic.

It’s very weird, and it makes me feel like I have to do the work all on my own. I have to do my own research into how to even feel neutral about my body and then how to feel positive about my body. The frustration grows.

 Dental and medical phobia are other mental health conditions I have that seem to need their own therapists. All therapists I’ve had have recommended exposure therapy, but they don’t seem to go into detail about practical ways that I can expose myself to the dentist and the doctor. One therapist once recommended that I practice just entering and leaving a doctor’s office without doing anything. I imagine myself entering the building to my primary care provider’s office, standing there for a minute and then leaving.

If I did this frequently enough, wouldn’t they notice and question what I was doing? It might just draw too much attention and would be really weird. No one seems to have good exposure techniques that I can try. Maybe there aren’t any. Maybe that’s just the pessimism speaking.

There’s also the entire childhood trauma I experienced. I had to live in a near-constant state of unbearable anxiety as I walked on eggshells around my mother and former stepdad. The abuse from teachers and incessant bullying created a deep wound within me that I am carrying with me as an adult. This trauma makes living and functioning in important ways very difficult for me. I struggle with severe anxiety at work due to my fear of authority figures and of punishment if I make mistakes. That’s because I was screamed at and hit on multiple occasions for making mistakes as a child. The list goes on. 

I’m not really sure how to end this. I guess I really want to have hope, but I need to acknowledge that realistically, I can’t always be hopeful in my treatment.

There will be bumps along the way.  I need to forgive myself, show myself compassion, and know that it’s okay for me not to heal “perfectly”. 

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