What Is Complex Trauma? Causes, Symptoms & Healing – C-PTSD

Dr Marianne Trent (: 00:00

What happens when trauma doesn't just happen once, but over years, when your body and brain are shaped by constant fear, neglect, or harm, the result isn't just PTSD, it's complex PTSD. Today we are talking about what complex trauma really is, how it shows up in adulthood, and most importantly, how healing is possible. I'll be sharing a fictional but realistic case study of Sarah whose childhood experiences led to a lifelong struggle with anxiety, self-doubt, and relationships until she found the right health. Stay tuned because understanding complex trauma could well change the way you think about your own or someone else's mental health forever.

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Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I'm Dr. Marianne, a qualified clinical psychologist. Thank you to everybody who watched my previous episode on complex PTSD and OCD, where I met with Alexandra, who spoke through her own experiences of this, and it's got lovely feedback, lots of views, lots of comments. If you haven't watched it or listened to it already, please do. However, I did also get a recent comment from somebody that they had thought when they saw the title, this would be an informational video rather than one person's case study. They would welcome more of an explainer. So this is what today's episode is going to be. If you've got any feedback about this episode or future episodes you'd like to see, please do drop them in the comments or get in contact with me via my social media where I'm Dr. Marianne Trent everywhere.

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If you've ever heard the phrase Complex Trauma Complex PTSD or even C PTs D, but maybe wondered what it is, this is going to be a great episode for you because today we are going to cover what constitutes or what makes up complex trauma, how it shapes the brain and the body, a case study of what complex trauma might look like in real life and what healing can look like. So whether you are working or have an interest in psychology yourself, whether you have lived experience of complex trauma or you love someone who does, this is going to be a brilliant episode, which gives you plenty of insight, validation, hope, and action plans too. So number one, what is complex trauma? When people imagine trauma and what that might look like, people often perhaps think about a single event that might be a car crash or witnessing an accident or hurting yourself physically.

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It usually involves feeling pretty terrified, but complex trauma happens when someone experiences chronic repeated trauma over months or years, often in their childhood. In fact, we often screen for the first 18 years of someone's life. Common causes of complex trauma include growing up with neglect or emotional abuse, experiencing physical or sexual abuse, having a caregiver with untreated mental illness or addiction being placed in foster care or experiencing other attachment disruptions. Because this type of trauma occurs in early life, it shapes the developing brain. This can lead to long-term effects on emotions, identity, and relationships. This type of trauma is often called type two trauma with type one trauma being the single event trauma such as the accidents or injuries. Okay, so now we've got a bit of an overview about what complex trauma is. Let's have a look at how it might look in a fictional case study example.

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Obviously, the content of today's conversation might feel triggering. If this feels like it resonates with you, please do look after yourself. And if you feel like now might not be the right time to watch or to listen to this episode, or if you are around young ears, please do choose to come back at a later stage. So let me introduce you to Sarah. She is a fictional case study, but her experiences are based on real people with complex PTSD. So let's take a little look at Sarah's childhood. Sarah grew up in a household where her parents were constantly arguing and her dad had violent outbursts. Sometimes he would hit her mom and Sarah would hide in the bathroom feeling completely terrified. She never knew what mood dad would be in when he got home from work. Sometimes he'd be fine, sometimes he'd be fun, sometimes he would explode over what seemed to be the smallest thing.

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In order to stay safe, Sarah seemed to learn that she had to be small, quiet, and pleasing to those around her. She became overly independent from a young age. She never expressed her emotions because it felt like it was safer not to. She overachieved at school trying to stay good to avoid conflict. So what was Sarah's adulthood like? Well, if we fast forward into Sarah's thirties, she is a high functioning professional, but behind the scenes she struggles with anxiety, especially when she feels like she's upset somebody. She can't relax. She's always on edge waiting for things to go wrong. She has low self-worth, low self-esteem, feeling like she's never good enough, and I'm sorry to say that Sarah seems to attract controlling partners. This is a case where repeating patterns are playing out from childhood. A quick note on other complex trauma experiences. While Sarah's story hasn't included sexual abuse, for many, this is what has happened in their childhood or young adulthood.

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Sexual abuse survivors often experience deep rooted shame and self-blame, dissociation, a feeling of disconnection from their body trust and intimacy issues. So of course, everybody's journey is so unique, and that's why trauma-informed therapy is so useful because it should be bespoke and tailormade to that person and their own unique experiences. If you would find it helpful to watch or listen to a full episode on this, please do let me know in the comments. So our third section, how does complex trauma show up in adulthood? For many people, complex, PTSD doesn't always look exactly like PTSD. In PTSD, you might have what feels like a classic flashback where something that happened from the past is playing out in the present. That's not always the case with complex PTSD. Instead, it can show up as kind of chronic anxiety and hypervigilance kind of a sense of being on edge and kind of tightly sprung and ready to react.

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It might look like emotional numbness or dissociation. It might feature struggles with boundaries and people pleasing. There might be a sense of feeling disconnected from your own needs, thinking that they don't matter or just not noticing them at all. And super commonly, there can be unexplained physical symptoms like migraines, IBS, fatigue, spinal disc, neck, back problems, fibromyalgia. The list can be really long. For Sarah, this showed up as a sense that she always had to prove herself never being able to relax because she felt like she was stuck in survival mode. If any of this sounds familiar, it's not just who you are or your personality, it's a trauma response. Okay, so section four, our healing and therapy approaches for people with complex trauma. So healing from complex trauma is absolutely possible, but it requires the right therapeutic approach. I work one-to-one with people with complex trauma, and I tend to weave compassion focused therapy or CFT through everything that I do.

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CFT is an approach designed to help people struggling with shame, self-criticism, and trauma by strengthening their ability to be compassionate both towards themselves and others. It's based on the understanding that our brains evolve to have a threat system which is focused on danger and survival, a drive system pushing us to achieve our goals and a soothing system which allows us to feel safe and cared for Many trauma survivors, the threat system is overactive and they struggle to access the feelings of safety or self-kindness In the context of PTSD and complex trauma, CFT is especially helpful for those who experience deep shame or self-criticism. It provides a pathway to self-acceptance and emotional resilience. And now feels like a great time to tell you about our tricky Brain psychoeducation kit, which uses compassion focused therapy to help professionals in working through people's trauma, depression, and grief. If you would like 10 pounds off the kit, please use the code YouTube 10 and head to my website www.aspiringpsychologist.co.uk.

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So as I said, I weave CFT through everything that I do, but there are also other approaches that I use and that are recommended for complex trauma too. So let's take a little look at those. So EMDR, you might have heard of that one, it's eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. I would say probably one of the biggest people to talk publicly about having received EMDR is Prince Harry. Of course, he had a very unusual childhood and he spoke about feelings of disconnection from those that were raising him, especially after his mom, princess Diana died in a really tragic way. So what EMDR does is it helps the stuff from the past to kind of lay flatter. It's really good for processing distressing memories and reducing trauma triggers. This means that it helps to kind of assimilate things into people's lives so they feel less jagged and so that they feel like they took place many years ago rather than being really recent.

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Often when I'm working with someone using EMDR, they might say something to me like, wow, I've just realised this happened 17 years ago, but I realised until now it felt like it was still happening, and that is what EMDR helps you to do. I always think of it a little bit like dry cleaning for the brain, or when you use a dishwasher and you're like, wow, that is squeaky clean for me. It's like that. It kind of gets to the parts that other therapies don't always reach, and you don't have to necessarily access words, and it kind of goes where it needs to go, and people can find it to be a really powerful intervention. The next is what's called somatic therapy. This helps to release the stored trauma in the body through movement, breath work, and mindfulness. This might also include things like yoga that can be really, really helpful because the ideas of Bessel VanDerKolk in his brilliant book, the Body Holds the Score talks about sometimes when our body's in particular positions, it can be really triggering because our body thinks, oh no, it's going to happen again because this is a position I was in when XY, Z happened.

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And so being able to process the traumas whilst in certain positions can be really powerful. Also, being able to take a look at them from a calmer physiological state where your breathing is regulated can help the brain and the body to work out that it's in the past, it isn't happening. Now, internal family systems, IFS, I know it might sound a little bit weird. It's the idea that we carry around younger parts or younger versions of ourselves or even versions of other people. It helps us to heal those inner wounded parts that might sometimes be driving our bus. It might be a 6-year-old version of ourselves that's determining what our 40-year-old self is doing in any given moment. So being able to tune in to what their fears, what their drives, what their motivators are, can be really powerful in helping to take back control from that terrified younger child part self, allowing the child to be a child again and allowing you the compassionate wise grownup to then be in charge. This can be so powerful and can really stop the derailing aspect of complex trauma from stopping you, being able to function and to go on and do the brilliant things that you want to be able to do in your adult life. And last but not least, we have Schema Therapy that is working on the deep seated core beliefs formed in childhood trauma, which helps people to reframe their sense of self.

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Many of them will be available in your local NHS services if you meet the access requirements for that service. Alternatively, if funds allow or you have insurance, you can access private therapy with clinicians who are trained and qualified to be able to work through these approaches with you. If you are watching on YouTube, I would love your comments. Have you received any of these therapies? Have you heard of these therapies before? What are your hopes, your thoughts, your reflections? Please do let us know in the comments, and if you resonate with anybody else in the comments, please do feel free to support them too, because it's so important if you are a clinician, is this helping you feel inspired about wanting to learn these approaches so that you can help people in future too? This might be a really nice opportunity to give a shout out to the people that trained me in EMDR.

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So Sandy Reichman, which is S-A-N-D-I, reichman is R-I-C-H-M-A-N, and she trained me in EMDR through her company. But my EMDR supervisor, Dr. Alexandra Button, is now running her own training events too. I don't get paid for telling you that, but I think it's really helpful to push you in the right direction if you do want to access quality robust training in EMDR. Now, in order to be trained in EMDR in the uk, you do need to have a professional qualification already or be in your final year of something like a trainee psychologist doctorate. More information about that will be available on both Sandy reichmans website and Dr. Alex Button's website too. I'll pop a link in the show notes and in the description. So, what did you make of Sarah's story? Does she remind you of anyone that you have worked with or yourself or someone that you care about?

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If this has resonated with you, I want you to know that you are not broken. Your trauma responses most definitely have made sense for you in the past in order to help you to feel safe. I also want you to know that healing is possible, even if right now it feels like it's out of reach. If you would like to learn methods to stabilise yourself, to learn about yourself, and to learn about the impact of complex trauma on your childhood and your adult self, please do consider the Feel Better Academy. If you would like 10 pounds off the purchase price of the Feel Better Academy, please use the code YouTube 10 on my website, www dot aspiring psychologist co uk. The Feel Better Academy is a really useful programme both for aspiring psychologists or mental health professionals to learn techniques to use with their clients, but it's actually designed for clients themselves to be able to go through and learn ways to self-soothe themselves, which really do help people to make massive improvements in terms of their wellbeing and their functioning.

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It's all of the ways that I would usually work with a client in a one-to-one capacity, but it's in a prerecorded format that you can access whenever the time is right for you with unlimited access. Okay, so that brings us to the end of our main content for today's session. I hope it's felt okay to listen to. I hope you've been able to keep yourself safe. Please do consider reaching out to mental health services if you feel like now is the right time for you to do so. Please do also consider Feel Better Academy if you feel like you can keep yourself safe currently, but would like to make changes going forwards. Has this episode been helpful? Honestly, the kindest, best thing you can do for any content creator and podcaster that you rate is to like their content, to subscribe to the channel and to drop a comment.

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