Let’s take an unexpected step back, and talk more about the EXPERIENCE of living with CPTSD, not just the brain processes that make it reality. With memory, attentional, emotional, and relationship issues at the forefront of the list, not to mention all the stress-based health failures, there’s a lot to say about the endless death march of having untreated CPTSD running the show. 

The real cumulative CPTSD experience is probably when we take all these tormentors coming from the insides of our own brains and bodies, lay awake all night, every night, and enjoy that endless tour de “all the most humiliating, lonesome, and terrified times in my life.” In my book, there’s nothing worse than the insomnia-shame combo that rips away any lingering sense of control or sanity you may have had.

It’s helpful to know that all your struggles come from one single mental origin. But more importantly, it’s critical to know that you aren’t alone and your neurons aren’t unfixable. 
This may be your life on CPTSD so far, but it doesn’t have to be your life forever. 

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Welcome to part 3b – some might call it part IV – of this miniseries on “CPTSD catchup” from the past 1.5 years of research podcasting, living (but feeling like dying) and communing.

Here’s what we’ve learned so far, in a concise and basic layout.

Get the podcasted version of this post wherever you stream, search “complex trauma.”

For more information on anything you hear… here… hit up the full backlog of episodes available at patreon.com, search “traumatized motherfuckers.”

Cheers Fuckers.

Jess

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Transcript / Blog Version:

What is COMPLEX Trauma, the experience?

Ya know, this isn’t what I planned on, but I decided to add a more experiential episode to this “defining CPTSD” conversation. Sometimes I turn off my feelings to exist, and my two 800 level neuroscience courses aren’t helping right now.

So let me take us back a step to just… What’s Complex Trauma, untreated, when you’re living it. Because, you know, some of us just want to hear, to the most basic extent, that we aren’t alone in all of this. Spreading validation of not being individually doomed by prior trauma was really the purpose of this project from the start, so let’s go back to the original theme and break this down more easily.

Complex trauma is socially-based, repeat trauma, that takes place when a person’s brain is still developing.

This means… Sexual and physical abuse? Yes.

But also, bullying from inside or outside the family unit. Verbal and emotional abuse. Over-controlling, emotionally void, or negligent parenting. Being around emotionally dysregulated – and therefore mentally dysregulated – humans who probably had their own untreated psychological downfalls.

Really, anything that causes chaos, such as addictions, poverty, unexpected loss, abandonment, and neurotic energy. Also, anything that causes internal chaos, such as overly critical, overly up-your-butt, overly dismissive, or just completely unpredictable family members….

These are the factors that create CPTSD.

Complex trauma also comes from being controlled and dismissed. Being told you’re “not right” in some or every way. Being expected to perform for others at the drop of a hat in some or every way. Being responsible for the emotional burden of the whole family unit. Being expected to always show up as the epitome of “traditional values” and “social compliance.”

Also commonly being told you’re “too sensitive” or “too difficult” within the social unit – you know, those early, subtle gaslightings that convince you feelings aren’t allowed or normal, and YOURS are definitely wrong. (So you can enjoy repressing your feelings for the rest of your life instead of ever listening to them telling you “holup these people ain’t right.”)

These are ALSO the factors that contribute to CPTSD.

Generally, complex trauma comes from anything that makes your brain start repeating scripts of being outcast and unacceptable. Shameful. Or, blameful. As in, being overly responsible for yourself or others, or the possible negative events of the entire world (we love victim blaming in trauma-narrated social groups).

Any event that suddenly made you unsure of who you are, what you are, or where you fit into the social hierarchy of the social group. Or made you doubt that you fit into ANY social group. Having an ongoing sense of being lonely, isolated, unsupported, unwanted, on your own, or “other.”.

These are the things that most often define complex trauma – not only the big, flashy, tragic events such as violent abuse.

These “more subtle” events impart the same trauma mechanism that we already discussed in the first episode by throwing the brain for a loop – remember, trauma is just a rapid switch from what we think we know to new information that contradicts it. Also, by creating a tendency for shame-based dissociation, memory failures, and extreme survival-driven behaviors forevermore down the road.

Thanks to the timing, these events cause developmental changes to the extremely young brain starting from day one in an upheaved home environment – by affecting the growth and connectivity of regions responsible for your emotional and stress regulation, threat detection, attentional system, and beyond.

Meaning, all those hypersensitivity problems you have? They’ve been in your brain from very early developmental events OR the absence of events that were supposed to spark organ changes.

Besides the brain developmental failures, these shitty social conditions all around you also create brain PATTERNING problems – a whole other thing to worry about. As in, how do your cognitions screw your entire system? Let’s look at the neurons that we link together through learned experiences, which are coded with bad information from the get-go. And down the road, let’s consider how that thought system makes us chronically doubt our own worth, not to mention the oppositional valuations that make us doubt our own opinions and decisions.

By that, I mean that we can extend CPTSD symptoms to events that caused your brain to develop one set of neural synaptic connections headed in one social-survival critical direction, such as “I can trust my mother to protect against danger”… and then caused you to create a completely conflicted set of instructions that tell you, “Oh hell no, I cannot. She’s the greatest threat of them all.”

Or, down the road, believing “I can trust myself,” only to almost immediately engage another operational system that says “Nope. Not at all. I’M the greatest threat of them all.”

On an experiential basis, I think this is a lot of the thought activity that we have.

Along with back and forth, black and white thinking that comes with massive emotional swings – which accounts for a whole lot of that “emotional dysregulation” issue we run into.

Let me tell you now, emotional disorders may be engrained in biochemical imbalances eventually, but your thoughts and emotions cyclically fuck with each other to a degree you’ve absolutely never noticed before. I don’t think 99% of we humans have.

From what I’ve seen, complex trauma folks are prime examples of top-down depression. As in, we’re prone to commonly falling down depressive pits that begin with our own negative evaluation of self… which actually began with other people’s negative evaluations of our self being persistently injected into our “eager to understand our place” brains years ago. The emotional change circles back up and creates another cognitive shitfest.. and soon we’re stuck in a “depressive circle of death.”

In other words, if your brain is primed correctly, your thoughts can create their own mental health adventures.

But, it needs to be mentioned that we can also fall into bottom-up self-abandonment patterns, such as when our negative emotions rise up to influence our THOUGHTS, engaging some “I fucking suck” assessments before eventually passing every new thought through a “why bother” filter that feeds back into the negative emotion again.

Like I said, “cognitive-emotional death spirals.”

So now we’ve covered trauma mechanisms, brain development failures, and toxic neural patterning that ruin our brain functioning. But somehow that’s nowhere near the end of our troubles. How do these present?

On an attentional front, we’re lacking control. We have a lot of attention, but it’s not often focused where we want it to go.

Meaning, we can have hyperactive attention spread across TOO MANY topics. This is why we’re all being diagnosed with ADHD right now. OR, our attention can be too concentrated in one area, leading to the obsessive and anxious issues we also have. Such as in relationships, work, and health troubles.

On the other hand, we can have a degraded ability for hosting our cognitive attention, such as when our emotions are too large and we intellectually dissociate. Like those days when you’re in a fog, unable to do anything besides get pummeled by feelings. OR during times when our parasympathetic systems are so overactivated that we can only stare at walls and sleep all day. Those times when your brain just feels “too tired” to be functional anymore.

It’s worth noting, you’ll probably often have this feeling at the beginning, middle, and end of chronically stressful days.

This is partly because we also have very inefficient brains. They’re so busy processing old events that we have less working capacity than others.

Our executive functioning activities, such as using working memory, planning, organizing, and having self-control are greatly inhibited when your brain is draining all its energy on trying to resolve subconscious sensory upsets and shame spirals. These are like open circuits that we don’t necessarily even realize are still spinning our energy around. This unsettled emotional energy drain runs like a background process 24/7, inhibiting your higher-level thinking. And it is doubly the case when you’re trapped in a state of acute and chronic stress system arousals.

Scientifically (and I need you to hear me on this) your brain cannot operate like it’s supposed to when you’re carrying an emotional, cognitive, or stress overload. And it gets much worse when it happens day after day. It WILL degrade your mental functioning, acutely and chronically. Which WILL degrade your lifestyle.

Folks who go on disability from trauma? Or, who suffer massive productivity dips out of nowhere when things get triggered or tumultuous? Or who can’t keep up with basic tasks when things get riled? Yep. This is why.

You actually (again, hear this) biologically cannot access your entire human brain, the frontal lobe, when you’re dealing with some rough shit.

So there you go, stop hating yourself, as compared to whoever you’re thinking of as “high functioning.” Maybe even a younger you.

On a memory system basis, we’re also troubled. We compartmentalize and therefore seemingly “black out” massive pieces of our memories. This is because the neuronal bits that we don’t WANT to visit? The negative memories? The ones that are too emotionally loaded? Or that cause survival system responses? We just won’t go there anymore. We learn to avoid areas of our own brains. And then we make the breakup as permanent as possible via letting those brain connections atrophy and die, leaving us with less pathways to get back to the unwanted neural information.

Putting information in one of these networks on accident? Well, it’ll make you feel like you’re constantly amnesiac, when you can’t get back to the information store. Not to mention, you don’t commit things to memory that you aren’t paying attention to. Making our attentional and memory system problems incestuous and difficult to sort out.

We also have very strong implicit memory systems, but much weaker explicit memory access. Meaning, we have a lot of emotionally coded memories, but we’re not so great at the wordy ones. This is possibly from routinely dissociating throughout our days, or from having a reduced sense of “self,” which is what I like to call our ongoing human consciousness.

Meaning, if you’re not really existing in your body, thinking of it being here on a continuous timeline, paying attention throughout… then you’re probably not encoding everything with those fancy language memories. So, those of us with blocked out recollections ages 5-8 or last week through yesterday, for example… but amazing memories when it comes to song lyrics from 25 years ago or for visualizing the color palette of the sky last month… Well, you encode those things differently, firstly. You’re more primed for emotional details, secondly. And your brain keeps some of these things far from your waking consciousness to protect you, thirdly.

What’s the main driver of this neural segmentation skill?

Shame.

It would be impossible to talk about living with complex trauma without talking about the main mechanism of feeling unacceptable and broken and all the downstream effects. Shame.

Essentially, feeling like you done fucked up with your loved ones is the intended role of shame. On a physical level, it’s more like a hot flash in the head, neck, and chest that comes with a lot of heavy pressure and gut-churning. Why? Shame is actually an evolutionary process meant to make you snap back into good social etiquette to minimize the likelihood of being abandoned or exiled.

Unfortunately, as you can guess, shame is overused in a lot of families, friendships, educational environments, obviously religion, workplaces, and other social constructs. We wind up accepting narratives that we aren’t allowed to do much of anything without suddenly being at risk for social punishment. Making us extremely self-doubting and likely to accept the perceptions of others before we honor our own.

We also wind up over-punishing ourselves with shame circuits that don’t end. If anything goes wrong in life, we’re 2 billion percent likely to blame ourselves. And then we have a tendency to obsessively focus our attention on this shameful thought, indefinitely. Or, until we compartmentalize those neurons.

During these shame fits, we enter depression territory. We isolate. We get super weird as we continually avoid more and more stimulation, especially from other people, because we’re already running at a critical load on a daily basis. Even the slightest criticism, energy change, ambiguity or perception of negative body language can push us solidly into a panicking state that presents as an earth-quaking emotional upset, possibly to a suicidal degree, as all our old shame pathways light up like a string of Christmas lights.

Suddenly, we’re being electrocuted by a life history of “being wrong and unlovable.” It happens out of nowhere, it makes us feel completely unstable when we’re .25 seconds away from “just fucking take me out behind the barn with a shotgun please,” and it clearly points to the presence of a lot of negative self-evaluation programming which was learned through historical experience – not something that’s inherently wrong with YOU.

A lot of this same learned and developmental programming will also cause us to become extremely anxious, hypervigilant, and catastrophizing with our assumptions about the past, present, and future. Since we’re the worst, the worst is also what we anticipate from life. Since we’ve always been in the line of fire in the past, our brains are very concerned about detecting present, and predicting future, dumpster flames.

And our dumb body seems to think our brain knows what its talking about as the supposed “adult in charge around here,” taking our perceptions and creating physical symptoms that only add more energy to the anxious system. It’s a vicious circle that we often get trapped in for years on end, as we drive our entire biological reactors into the ground.

And by that, I mean… yes, your emotions are probably like a self-perpetuating wildfire in a climate crisis.

But also, you know all those individual health concerns you may have been dealing with?

Those myriad health problems ruining your world? They’re all one thing. They’re stress.

If you have autoimmune basically-anything, mysterious ailments that come and go, or systemic failures whenever the rest of your life is going to shit… it’s your stress system. Some people call it fibromyalgia. Some people call THAT internal inflammation receptors and referred pain. A lot of doctors prefer to call it psychosomatic illness and roll their eyes as they scoff you out of the office. But the laundry list of physical ailments caused by anxiety and stress is out of control.

Essentially, we can check “all of the above” on the list of common symptoms of malaise, but let’s also say digestive system deregulations and rapidly changing dietary sensitivities, MS, migraines, mysterious aches and pains, diabetes, dental issues, acid reflux, arthritis, and sudden seeming “allergies” to name a few… Anything linked to chronic, western-medically uncontrollable inflammation or whole-system dysregulation… is often a stress-imparted illness.

And on that note, probably don’t bother treating them all one by one, you’ll never win. Just end up on a handful of meds that don’t really address the underlying problem. Focus on calming the fuck down, controlling your cognitions, and keeping your survival system in check.

On an even larger systemic level, pulling together everything we’ve talked about so far… early untreated CPTSD will also create what we traditionally think of as “unstable” lives. Lots of job changes, personal changes, relationship changes.

Later stage untreated CPTSD will often create stagnant, unchanging lives with few connections or novel experiences, as the trauma bubble of perceived safety is created with rigid routines and then rarely deviated from – an extreme presentation of adaptive avoidance gone to a dysfunctional degree.

Relationship-wise, because of all these factors and bad behavioral instructions, we tend to recreate abuse dynamics.

And that flows in both directions. Sorry. We’re most likely to be abused AND be abusers, compared to the general public. We often become helpless, nervous creatures who project “needing saving.” And, yeah, this attracts people who want to control you. You’ll probably have tumultuous, emotional, highly connective and emotional… but poorly executed… relationships that feel worse than being alone, but somehow less terrifying than being alone, and therefore seem necessary.

We also can flip into the narcissist end of the pool, and become abusers ourselves.

Sometimes this is obvious, such as the common male reaction to trauma – grandiose narcissism. You’ll get lots of “have to be the smartest pants in the room” energy from male complex trauma survivors.

But, sometimes this falls into the more female-prone category of “victim narcissists,” or “vulnerable narcissists.” These VulNarcs as we call them in the community are a rather puzzling mix of “take care of me because I’m the best, but also because I’m the worst and can’t take care of myself… also because I’m too busy caring for everyone else, and lastly, because you owe me for some long-past care you didn’t ask for.”

Lots to say about narcissists and CPTSD. Same with Borderline Personality Disorder – the lower-self-regard, more stereotypically “female” presentation of anxious attachment mixed with complex trauma. And yes, I think there are diagnostic gender issues at work here.

But the point is, with CPTSD our relationships tend to be bad news.

Close relationships are our most challenging ones, because they signify security (or lack there of) and also remind us of our early family dynamics. We want them AND fear them.

Distant relationships are also hard, because we don’t often trust people… and always assume that they assume the worst about us. This unfortunately has the power to hijack those shame pathways and throw us – again – into recollecting our early social shambles, which, as we said, can then create an emotional and survival system domino effect that leads to “inconsolable fear and/or self-hating ruminatory depression” in no time flat.

I think the worst part, though, is cumulatively speaking about all of these problems…. When we take all these tormentors coming from the insides of our own brains and bodies, lay awake all night, every night, and enjoy that endless tour de “all the most humiliating, lonesome, and terrified times in my life.”

In my book, there’s nothing worse than the insomnia-shame combo that rips away any lingering sense of control or sanity you may have had.

Be sure to wake up in the morning after 2 hours of barely-sleep, now extremely hungover from the cocktail of sleep meds you dosed yourself with and shockingly survived, just to feel that first pang of depression or anxiety that marks your daily reality. Stumble through the day, not really what I would describe as “alive,” as you just try to do the bare minimum to survive – because, completely honestly – your brain doesn’t have another single spare ounce of energy to do anything else. Then just numb the roughest moments with substances, food items, and social escapes. Distract yourself with scrolling at dumb shit.

Keep asking “What’s the point of this endless death march?” (that’s what I call it) and reminding yourself “I didn’t even ask to end up at this asshole parade.” Just watch miserably as the hours crawl by, trapped in your own brain, in your own skin, probably feeling pretty easily agitated, angered, and outraged. Towards everyone. But mainly, if you’re being honest, at the root of it… towards yourself, for multiply layered reasons.

Get yourself ready for bed at 7pm – because, dear satan, this is the only thing you look forward to anymore. And then… get ready, again, to be wired-wide awake, digging through everything you want to forget, and more than a few paranoid Google searches about your failing health until the sun starts to rise again.

At the most basic level, everything we’ve talked about here so far are the “basics” of existing with unmanaged, untreated, unrecovered CPTSD. Which, in my eyes, is why we needed a whole extra episode about the experience of seeing your whole life decline.

Also, about how compassionate you can start to be with yourself for enduring this self-perpetuating nightmare that would put ANYONE in an institution over time.

The caveat being, trying to get treatment to unravel this disaster doesn’t necessarily help… and actually… it can often make it all even worse. Because treating CPTSD isn’t the same as treating anxiety, depression, obsession and self-hate. It requires a whole different set of skills.

And, finally, THIS challenge is where we’re going to pick up next time. When we start talking about one of the biggest obstacles in escaping this life-engulfing hellscape – just finding a therapist who knows how to handle our brains and actually help our unique neural architecture instead of poking the bear and disappearing.

The good news being, you can do it.

You CAN find effective trauma therapy. And from there, you can make massive improvements. Life doesn’t have to be this way, and there IS a reason to keep trying.

Trust me, as a very opportunity-limited individual who just wrote this whole nightmare from an experiential perspective known as “my 20’s,” but now just casually talks about it with an over the top facetious tone while nodding reassuringly. And do so during “spare time” outside of a master’s program, several jobs, daily maintenance on a sensitive bodily ecosystem, and navigating, let’s call it, “transient living” with nonstop tumult.

If my turdbutt can get into therapy, get my mental health ailments under control, and rapidly return to high-functioning levels of performance, your turdbutt can do it too. You just need to know what to look for.

So. I will meet you here next time. And we will dig into the horrorshow known as “I need a trauma-trained and experienced therapist with appropriate personal boundaries and no unexamined shame narratives, themselves.”

See you then.

Cheers Y’all.

Jess