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Complex PTSD is often the result of repeated, ongoing, personal harms that occur within a significant relationship and during a developmentally significant period in our life. The types of traumatic hurt commonly leading to C-PTSD may include various forms of abuse, neglect, manipulation, humiliation, or abandonment. These hurts may have lasting, detrimental, stress-inducing effects on our sense of the world, sense of our self, sense of belonging, and sense of choice and control in our life. C-PTSD often leaves us feeling persistently overwhelmed, ashamed, ill, not enough, insecure, unworthy, helpless, or hopeless. I liken the pain and suffering typical from this type of trauma as “defeat from a thousand paper cuts”. It feels like we are failing at life, like we are broken or defective, perhaps like we brought the hurt we have experienced upon ourselves, like the pain may just last forever, or like healing is not even possible. C-PTSD has a rattling effect upon the core of who we feel we are.

 

The challenges we face in life due to Complex PTSD’s impact usually include blockages to accessing an abundant, integrated, and capable sense of Self; emotional, physical, and mental dysregulation and distress; and strains, unsettledness, or chaos felt within many of our relationships. Thus, the best trauma healing work available includes the antidote to these challenges: accessing and empowering ones’ capacities and potentials in the present day and toward one’s future; processing of painful (and also yummy!) emotions, beliefs, sensations, and associations in the present moment; and engaging in a caring, thoughtful, curious, personal, open-hearted, and authentic relationship between client and therapist.

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As a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional specializing in Complex PTSD, I offer to my clients the necessary relational, empowerment-based, experiential, compassionate, and “slow but steady” care that provides a deeply felt shift from the features that commonly come with traumatic experiences. What becomes available to us in our work together includes:

 

• working through vulnerable emotions and sensations related to themes brought up in session

• witnessing our nervous system’s experience and befriending the ongoing wisdom it has to share

• bringing online the felt sense of our inner wisdom and Self-energy

• learning what safety and security actually feels like in the mind and body

• envisioning a life beyond your perceived limitations

• providing mindfulness as an alternative for ruminating, obsessive, and spiraling thinking

• appreciating how, in the past, your protective patterns made it possible to survive and no doubt kept you alive (how remarkably brilliant that is!)  

• accepting that those very same patterns that ensured your survival in the past, may be hindering, blocking, or thwarting the possibility of having a thriving life, today

• compassionately challenging negatively-warped and emotionally-hijacked thoughts and beliefs

• learning to be in a more helpful, courageous, and caring relationship with all aspects of yourself

• giving rightful consideration and respect to experiences of joy, ease, pride, courage, and confidence 

• shifting from dissociation into more safe and more secure embodiment

• building tolerance for nuance, choice, creativity, and complexity in all of your relationships

• making meaning through your unique values and legitimate human rights

• transforming helplessness into aligned action, optimism, and resiliency

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There are many potential goals to seek from trauma-healing therapies, and, as with many aspects of therapy, goals are highly individualistic. Here are self-statements that may resonate with your goals for trauma healing:

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• I am aware of how my past affects me in the present.

• The past is different from the present moment and from the present day.

• I can be mindful of, feel safety in, and can experience some rest in the present moment.

• I can feel a sense of safety, rest, and genuine okay-ness in the present moment.

• I can sense and feel in my body now.

• I can explore, honor, and value my emotional life.

• I have a sense of control in my life.

• I trust that I deserve good things to happen to me. 

• I sense that I (and my nervous system) am resilient.

• I can orient toward the future.

• I now have choices about my thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

• I sense that I am a whole, complex, and unique person with inherent value.

 

It is important to know that engaging in trauma-healing therapy is NOT about just stewing in the pain for the sake of stewing in it, achieving “perfect” results, breezing through a quick check-list of all possible self-care activities, “pleasing” your therapist, learning to “just cope/do/feel better”, making past events never happen, behaving “correctly”, or somehow removing all challenge and hardship out of life - these are either not realistic, or at the very best, are just attempts at applying a band-aid to a wound that keeps festering. 

 

Rather than placing a band-aid on the wound and hoping it heals itself while under wraps, we can work to heal the root and source of the traumatic injury itself. The healing journey with C-PTSD is often long, difficult, and without easy life hacks. But with bravery, honesty, and commitment, know that transformation, resiliency, and satisfaction are indeed possible. It is my sincere honor to support each and every client who chooses to engage in this deep and often life-changing work.