What is Complex Trauma (CPTSD?)

Defining Complex PTSD (CPTSD)?

While PTSD has to do with a single overwhelming event, Complex PTSD (CPTSD) is the prolonged or repeated experiences of stress, fear, emotional pain, or relational trauma over time, particularly where a person felt trapped, powerless, or emotionally alone.

From a developmental perspective, CPTSD can develop through experiences such as childhood emotional neglect, unstable caregiving, chronic criticism, emotional unpredictability, bullying, abusive relationships, or growing up in environments where you didn’t feel emotionally safe, seen, or accepted for who you were. However, CPTSD can also develop in adulthood through experiences such as emotionally abusive relationships, domestic violence, repeated betrayal, workplace bullying, ongoing instability, medical trauma, prolonged stress, or situations where a person feels trapped, powerless, unsafe, or emotionally isolated over an extended period of time.

Many people with CPTSD are highly self-aware. They often understand their patterns logically, yet still feel emotionally stuck in cycles of anxiety, shame, people pleasing, hypervigilance, emotional overwhelm, or difficulty trusting themselves and others. This is often rooted in survival adaptations developed in environments where emotional safety, keeping the peace, or staying connected to caregivers felt necessary for survival. When a person has relied on these patterns for 10, 20, or more years, it’s understandable how these survival responses moulds their identity, nervous system, relationships, boundaries, and the way they move through the world.

At its core, CPTSD is often a nervous system adaptation to prolonged stress, emotional pain, or survival environments.

It’s important to note that Complex PTSD is not only rooted in childhood experiences. While early attachment wounds and developmental trauma are common contributors, particularly because children are dependent on caregivers and don't always have the option to simply leave unsafe or unhealthy environments, CPTSD can also develop through prolonged or repeated traumatic experiences later in life.

This may include:

• emotionally abusive, manipulative, or controlling relationships

• chronic bullying or workplace abuse

• repeated betrayal or relational trauma

• domestic violence

• exposure to ongoing instability, fear, or unpredictability

• living in survival mode for extended periods of time

• medical trauma or repeated invasive medical experiences

• war, displacement, or exposure to ongoing violence

• prisoner of war experiences or captivity

What often links these experiences is not simply the event itself, but the chronic feeling of powerlessness, unsafety, emotional isolation, or the nervous system being unable to fully return to baseline over time.

Trauma is less about 'what should have affected you' and more about what your nervous system experienced as overwhelming, threatening, emotionally unsafe, or too much to process alone. Two people can go through similar experiences and be impacted very differently depending on the level of emotional support, safety, connection, and co-regulation available to them at the time. Research shows that a person who had at least one safe, attuned, and emotionally supportive figure who listened, comforted, protected, or helped them make sense of their experiences is less impacted by trauma than someone who had to carry it alone.

This is why emotional neglect, invalidation, abandonment, or feeling unseen can sometimes leave wounds that are just as significant as the events themselves.

Many people minimise their experiences because they compare themselves to others and think: “Nothing that bad happened to me,” especially if it's all that they've known and normalised. But trauma is not only about what happened. It is also about what was missing - emotional safety, attunement, consistency, reassurance, connection, and feeling emotionally held. A person can grow up with food on the table and practical needs met, yet still feel emotionally isolated, misunderstood, or disconnected. Over time, this can profoundly impact the nervous system, relationships, coping mechanisms, emotional regulation, sense of belonging and sense of self.

Signs of Complex Trauma (CPTSD)

CPTSD can look different for everyone, but some common experiences include:

• Becoming highly sensitive to other people’s moods or behaviour

• Fear of abandonment or rejection

• Overthinking relationships and interactions

• Struggling with boundaries

• Emotional flashbacks or intense triggers

• Chronic shame or feeling 'not enough'

• Difficulty relaxing or feeling safe

• Hypervigilance

• People pleasing or prioritising others at your own expense

• Feeling emotionally numb or disconnected

• Harsh self-criticism

• Difficulty trusting yourself or your intuition

• Substance abuse

• Emotional dysregulation

What CPTSD Can Be Confused For

Because CPTSD impacts so many areas of functioning, it is sometimes mistaken for:

Anxiety Disorders

Many people with CPTSD experience chronic hypervigilance, racing thoughts, panic, muscle tension, and a nervous system that struggles to switch off.

Depression

CPTSD can lead to emotional shutdown, hopelessness, numbness, fatigue, isolation, and loss of connection to self or purpose.

ADHD

There can sometimes be overlap between CPTSD and ADHD symptoms, including difficulty concentrating, emotional dysregulation, restlessness, forgetfulness, overwhelm, or nervous system overstimulation. In some cases, chronic stress and hypervigilance can mimic attention difficulties.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

Fear of abandonment, emotional intensity, unstable relationships, and difficulty regulating emotions can overlap with CPTSD. However, many trauma-informed clinicians recognise that unresolved attachment trauma and chronic nervous system dysregulation are often central pieces of the picture.

Highly Sensitive Personality Traits

Many people with CPTSD become highly attuned to other people’s emotions, moods, tone shifts, and environmental stressors as a survival adaptation. This can sometimes look like extreme sensitivity or emotional overwhelm.

Perfectionism or “Type A” Personality

What appears to be high achievement, perfectionism, overworking, or excessive self-reliance can sometimes be rooted in survival patterns, fear of failure, or a deep need for safety, approval, or control.

Physical Health Symptoms

Chronic nervous system dysregulation can also impact the body physically. Some people with unresolved trauma experience ongoing fatigue, digestive issues, chronic tension, inflammation, sleep issues, autoimmune conditions, or other stress-related health symptoms.

Why Childhood Experiences Still Affect Us as Adults

Our nervous systems learn about safety through relationships, especially in childhood. If love felt conditional, unpredictable, emotionally unavailable, critical, or inconsistent, the body can adapt by becoming hyper-aware of threat, rejection, conflict, or abandonment.

This can lead to the amygdala - the brain’s fear and threat detection centre - becoming overactive, while the sympathetic nervous system remains stuck in a chronic stress response, repeatedly releasing stress hormones throughout the body. Over time, these protective survival patterns can become deeply wired into the nervous system and continue showing up in adulthood through relationships, self-worth, difficulty sitting with emotions and regulating, susceptibility to mental health disorders, and in some cases, physical health symptoms or chronic illness.

This is because trauma is not only psychological - it is also physiological. When the nervous system spends long periods of time in survival states such as fight, flight, freeze, or shutdown, the effects can begin to manifest physically within the body as well. This is why unresolved trauma and chronic nervous system dysregulation are often associated not only with emotional symptoms, but also fatigue, chronic tension, digestive issues, sleep disturbances, inflammation, burnout, autoimmune conditions, and other stress-related health symptoms.

CPTSD and the Nervous System

People with CPTSD are often living with a dysregulated nervous system without realising it.

This can look like:

• anxiety

• emotional overwhelm and reactivity

• dissociation / shutdown / numbness

• chronic stress

• difficulty resting / an overactive Sympathetic Nervous System

• burnout

• panic responses

• feeling disconnected from the body

These are survival responses that once served a purpose.

And this is where approaches such as EMDR and other somatic therapies can help. Rather than only talking about the past, body-based approaches work with the nervous system and body to complete unresolved threat responses, allowing the body to recognise that the present is safe, and that the past can finally be left in the past.

Healing From CPTSD

Healing from CPTSD is not about “fixing” yourself. It is about creating safety within yourself and gently understanding the protective patterns you developed to survive.

This often involves:

• developing self-awareness without self-judgment

• understanding triggers and emotional responses

• reconnecting with the body

• learning emotional regulation

• building healthier boundaries

• processing unresolved experiences

• developing self-compassion

• creating safer relational experiences

Tools such as journalling, mindfulness, nervous system education, somatic practices, therapy, and self-reflection can all support the healing process. I also created a 52 page Emotional Regulation Journal designed to help people better understand their emotions, triggers, nervous system, relational patterns, coping mechanisms, and inner world in a more compassionate and grounded way.

Healing is rarely linear, and it does not necessarily mean never getting triggered again. CPTSD is not always something that simply “disappears” forever, but rather becomes part of a person’s story, self-understanding, and growth. Over time, many people are able to relate to their past with greater awareness, compassion, wisdom, and resilience.

For some, the very adaptations that once developed through survival can later evolve into strengths - such as heightened intuition, empathy, creativity, emotional depth, sensitivity, insight, or a unique way of seeing and relating to the world.

Often, healing looks less like becoming a completely different person, and more like gradually feeling safer in your body, more connected to yourself, more emotionally regulated, and less controlled by old survival patterns.

You Are Not “Too Much”

Many people with CPTSD grew up feeling like they were too sensitive, too emotional, too needy, or somehow fundamentally flawed. But often, what developed was a nervous system that adapted to environments where emotional safety was inconsistent or missing.

Your responses make sense in the context of what you’ve lived through. I always think no reaction is out of proportion with the events that lead up to it.

Healing and integration are possible. I know this not only through professional training, but through my own lived experience and personal healing journey with not only CPTSD, but diagnosed major depression, generalised anxiety disorder, burnout, and anorexia.

The process was not linear, and it took roughly 15 years of deep self-inquiry, growth, grief, countless therapies and therapists, and learning to understand my own nervous system and patterns. It’s the part of me that allows me to sit with others in a compassionate, grounded, and non-judgemental way today.

My intention is not to 'fix' people, but to support them in understanding themselves more deeply, processing unresolved pain, and reconnecting with a greater sense of safety, self-worth, and authenticity.

If you’re looking for trauma-informed online counselling, I offer a compassionate and grounded approach integrating person-centred therapy, somatic approaches, and EMDR to support emotional healing, nervous system regulation, self-worth, and deeper self-understanding.