A common saying among mental health professionals is that trauma is not what happened to you, it’s what happened inside you as a result of something that overwhelmed your ability to cope. It’s what happened to your nervous system, your sense of safety, your relationship with yourself, your ability to relate to others. Trauma is the wound left behind, and the scar tissue you developed to survive.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can develop after a single, short-lived traumatic event: an accident, an assault, a medical procedure, a bereavement. It can show up as intrusive memories or flashbacks, nightmares, constantly feeling like you’re on high alert and doing everything you can to avoid triggers that can send you straight into the past.
Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) tends to stem from trauma that was prolonged, repeated, or happened in relationships that were supposed to be safe, where you should have been able to rely on someone — a parent, a caregiver, a partner, a person with power over you. Child abuse, which includes emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, is one of the more common roots of C-PTSD I work with.
Because of the nature of the threat, alongside the flashbacks and hypervigilance common with PTSD, C-PTSD often manifests in ways that feel like they are integral to who you are: a harsh inner critic, a part that mistrusts others just as much as it mistrusts your own judgement, a part that tends to dissociate or that swings between needing closeness and putting up a wall that drives everyone away. But these parts are not who you are; they are simply — and ingeniously — what your body and mind came up with to help you survive. Part of our work with complex trauma is fostering a new relationship to yourself, building trust and teaching your nervous system how to tell past from present. This is hard, often longer-term work, and sometimes it helps to have an idea of what it might look like before we begin.
The shape of the work
Trauma therapy isn’t a straight line; there are peaks and valleys, sometimes even spirals, and no one’s healing journey looks exactly like someone else’s. However, the work does tend to move in phases: first, building safety and a solid therapeutic relationship. This can take time, and we need to move at your pace. Trauma is often about having choice, agency, and control taken away from you; it’s important for therapy to feel like something you’re actively engaged in, not something done to you.
As our relationship matures and your parts start to trust both of us to handle the material, more of your story may unfold. We may discover painful beliefs that surround your traumatic experiences, patterns that no longer serve you, burdens that have been bequeathed to you and that you’ve had to carry, unfairly, for years. We will endeavour to understand how you survived, how these patterns have kept you alive and what can now replace them. And, finally, to put those burdens down.
Ultimately, we cannot change the past, but we can change your relationship to it. As trust in yourself and your self-worth builds, reactivity is replaced by choice, and this is where freedom lives.
Progression between these three phases isn’t smooth or predictable — we might often circle back, jump ahead, go too fast or too slow. But none of this is a failure or a setback; it is simply the work. And my hope is that, ultimately, the work is its own reward.
If you are in crisis or at risk of harm right now, please see the crisis support options — I am not able to offer emergency support.