Trauma is any experience that is too much, too fast, or too soon for an individual or community that is not promptly held or grounded in safe connection and belonging afterwards. It is rupture without repair, overwhelm without calm, psychological and physiological pain without expression, so it fragments and gets locked up and away from our consciousness, lodged into the body. Complex trauma includes too much rupture/overwhelm, and it also emphasizes a too little or missing repair/soothing, attunement/regulation response. Often when we think about trauma, we think about acute trauma. Complex trauma, on the other hand, is continuous/repetitive and it is relational/systemic encompassing intergenerational trauma, intrauterine and pre-verbal trauma, developmental trauma, developmental trauma, attachment trauma, collective trauma, vicarious trauma, and existential-religious trauma (iptrauma.org). Complex trauma can develop as a result of caregiver’s love that felt conditional, unpredictable, or absent, emotional neglect that left the child feeling unseen, unheard, or unimportant, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, or witnessing familial chaos, dysfunction, domestic violence, addiction, and/or mental health issues.
In all phases of life, we need co-regulation, but as children, we depend on it, lacking the ability to self-regulate until it is experienced and modeled consistently, overtime through co-regulation. When we experience stress and trauma as our nervous system is developing, the nervous system develops adaptations to survive the childhood environment; for example, when a child experiences distress or senses danger or dislocation, but they lack the power to change their environment, they implicitly and unconsciously learn to change themselves (often internalizing a negative self-concept) in hopes to maintain the sense of belonging that is essential for survival. We mirror our caregiver’s nervous systems to fit in with the family system and we might adapt by becoming the calm for our caregivers, offering them co-regulation to attempt to earn connection or prevent rejection. We might attune to their stress response and anticipate their emotional needs through hypervigilance (heightened threat detection), called “parentification”, where the child takes on adult roles & responsibilities. It usually involves the fawn response (a blended state of mobilization and dissociation), and it is one of protective adaptations we might have implicitly (without conscious awareness or choice) learned, showing up in adults as people-pleasing, masking, perfectionism, and/or chronic pain, the cost being self-abandonment. We might learn to predict and prepare for instability and insecurity in ourselves, our relationships, and the world, which can keep us in a braced or collapsed stance of mind/body/spirit.
You may have heard of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a diagnosis in the DSM-5) or CPTSD (a diagnosis in the ICD-11). As a non-pathologizing practitioner who believes language is an container that gets to evolve to expand and deepen meaning-making, I have chosen to leave out “disorder” inspired by the Trauma Rewired Podcast, but each person should use the language that is most supportive to them. CPTS(Complex Post-Traumatic Stress) can be psychologically expressed in sleep disturbances (insomnia, nightmares), difficulty trusting people, negative self-perception, fragmented memory and/or identity, hypervigilance, heightened startle response, dissociation, chronic shame, and addiction. It is neurobiologically associated with baseline dysregulation/autonomic dysfunction, hyperactivity of the amygdala (internal fire alarm), hypoactivity in the prefrontal cortex (emotional regulation, planning, and decision-making), and reduced hippocampal (image-based memory) volume; furthermore it is also associated with hypocortisolism (excess cortisol pattern) or flattened diurnal cortisol curves (burnout of the stress-response system), neurochemical imbalances (often reduced serotonin and dopamine levels), and alterations in endogenous opioid systems (contributing to emotional numbing and inability to experience joy or pleasure) (iptrauma.org). Physiologically, trauma in expressed in our fascia, breathing patterns, heart rate variability, posture, some chronic illnesses, chronic pain (and pain perception).