complex traumA
Our Stories do not prepare us
WHAT IS IT?
Complex Trauma aka Complex-PTSD: when a person who should have protected you hurt you.
This includes parents, romantic partners, bosses, friends, clergy, leaders, and medical providers, whether you are a child or an adult.
Symptoms include, but are not limited to: feeling helpless, dissociation, panic attacks, avoidance, rumination, worried thoughts, feeling guilty, impaired capacity to say “no,” muted emotions, forgetting past emotional pain, ignoring needs and desires, low self-esteem, flashbacks, substance abuse, and being unable to quiet your mind.
WHy is it so bad?
Emotional or physical trauma is hard to recover from when it comes from a stranger. It becomes a struggle to feel safe in a world where you know from your own experience that bad people can harm you.
But it’s way worse when it comes from someone who was supposed to protect you. Where do you go to feel comforted and soothed? Where do you go to get support?
The source of support is also the source of pain. Your head gets scrambled. The neurological affects are plenty and include a smaller hippocampus and lower threshold for the autonomic nervous center to kick in.
most of us freeze
Let’s get this out of the way. Most people freeze. You freeze and then feel ashamed about freezing. F**k fight or flight. Without training, you will freeze. In more than 20 years, only 3 patients did not freeze when they were sexually violated. Fear of future paralysis becomes a cause of rumination and panic.
I tell my patients, let’s prepare you for freezing so you don’t shame yourself when you do freeze. Freezing and dissociating protects us. You can check out Deb Dana’s work on polyvagal research.
WHAT DO I MEAN BY STORIES?
Stories (tv, movies, novels, popular culture) give us many social templates. We learn things like: “this is how you ask someone out” “this is what high school social dynamics are like” “this is what it looks like when parents get divorced.” I’ll be talking about this more extensively in my videos, but for now here is a summary: stories do not prepare you, so when you have a normal trauma reaction you think your response is wrong because you’ve never seen what a real response looks like. And then you are too ashamed and disoriented to figure out what you need to do to heal.
Stories tell us that sexual assault looks like a stranger in an alley and you kick and scream, or that abuse looks like aka a drunk man who hits you but doesn’t really mean it. So when people experience trauma that doesn’t look like that, they do not know to call it a violation. In more than twenty years, I’ve never had one patient who was sexually assaulted in an alley. Though I still avoid alleys, I can tell you that almost none of the real traumas happen like they do in popular culture. A stunning exception to this is “I May Destroy You,” based on the real life experiences of writer, actress, and director Michaela Coel. (It’s a complete masterpiece but can be too intense for people who have experienced sexual assault.)
Likewise, emotional abuse can be hard to recognize because we are not taught what it looks like. When your partner flips between doling out praise and punishment, the disorientation can keep you hooked. Plus, people think that the worst part of abuse is the pain, but it’s not.
The worst part is how you do not know how to see that you are becoming diminished. In order to stay with someone emotionally abusive, you have to forget their awful behavior on a regular basis, banish the parts of yourself that they dislike, and slowly become more dependent on the abusive person, all while working harder and harder to try to please them. Overtime, your emotional resources deplete, making you more reliant on the abusive person, while thinking it is all your fault.
A quick test:
1. Are you sometimes scared of the person?
2. Have you learned to pay attention to & manage their moods?
3. Name three things that they want. Now name three things you want. Which was easier?
4. Would you rather suffer than make them angry?
5. Do you have to defend them with “that’s just the way they are” or “they don’t really mean it”
6. Do you find yourself avoiding social situations altogether because it’s easier?
why it’s so confusing
Only a small fraction of people who have disclosed rape, emotional abuse, or parental abuse to me have known to call it abuse.
Because the person hurting you doesn’t verbally acknowledge what they are doing while they violate you. Also, the nature of violation includes making the victim feel both the responsibility and shame of the perpetrator.
Not all abusers know that they are abusers, but few of them care once they are told because they do not perspective take from your experience. Instead, they focus only on their own sense of entitled unmet needs.
what makes you susceptible?
If you are the type of person who as an adult choose to enter a relationship with an abusive person, you are likely remarkably talented at perspective taking and at meeting people’s needs. You likely had a care-giver who was good at using people.
You will struggle to comprehend is that some people never perspective take (yes, the irony). But you can’t imagine a mind that doesn’t perspective take because it is how you breathe.
You were also likely groomed to be taught that other people’s feelings were your fault or responsibility, so it is easy to believe you should try harder and it’s your fault.
why is c-ptsd suddenly everywhere?
Clinicians have observed this complex trauma abuse pattern for a long time; I’ve been calling “Attachment Trauma” since around 2004. But it is not yet an official DSM5 diagnosis. This type of hurt has been largely invisible in society because definitionally, it’s always the person with less power in a situation that gets traumatized. People with more power set the language and terms for discussion, decide what is considered important, determine where money goes, and what policies look like.
Meanwhile, while the people with less power and representation suffer silently. It’s definitely a huge part of patriarchy and capitalism (and to be clear, I’m not totally against capitalism). Remember that up until relatively recently a man could not be charged with raping his wife because she already belonged to him.
Now that we have more platforms for marginalized experiences, this type of harm is finally being named and treated on a mainstream level. I whole-heartedly believe that if everyone was aware of how complex trauma worked, we could create a utopia in one or two generations.
Here is my guide for how to respond when someone tells you about their sexual trauma.