Complex Childhood Trauma
You’re struggling with:
Chronic shame and guilt
People pleasing tendencies - putting toxic people before your own wellbeing.
Trusting other people
Feeling isolated and alone, like no one could understand
The fear of being judged for your experiences
Relationships that are abusive (mimicking your childhood)
Communicating your feelings and emotions in a healthy way
Feeling out of control emotionally (i.e., anger, hopelessness, shame)
Loss of meaning and purpose
What is Complex Trauma (C-PTSD)?
Trauma comes in many forms. We often think of people with trauma as military vets with PTSD or sexual abuse survivors. But there are many of us in the world who have not experienced these two types of trauma who carry complex trauma from lesser known experiences.
Complex trauma forms over many years of being in an abusive or neglectful environment. As children in these situations, we cannot leave and must rely on the environment that is causing this abuse. This causes long-term, and wide-ranging effects on our emotional, physical, and mental development and wellbeing.
Complex trauma forms from ongoing emotional or physical neglect, abandonment, disconnection from family due to your identity, verbal or emotional abuse, physical or sexual abuse, parentification (taking care of your parent as a child), religious trauma through brainwashing and shame, witnessing domestic violence or abuse, experiencing civil unrest or genocide, and cultural dislocation.
It’s time to truly heal…
Whatever type of trauma you have, it is valid and so are your emotions and responses to that trauma.
The old ways of working with complex trauma don’t stand up over time and often don’t address the core issue. Your therapist or healer either washed over the trauma, trying to instill new skills for distress tolerance and emotion regulation or they dove headfirst into re-experiencing the trauma and possibly re-traumatized you in the process.
With a trauma-informed approach like Internal Family Systems (IFS), we do none of the above.
My Trauma-Informed Approach
To begin our work, I provide accurate trauma-informed education around the body’s response to trauma. Our reactions, behaviors, and responses to traumatic events have a natural, adaptive reason for existing. Then we can begin to soften and bring compassion to our system, knowing it is working properly and taking care of us during these times. Once we have this understanding, we can begin to shift and heal using IFS.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a powerfully transformative, experiential, trauma-informed, and evidence-based model of psychotherapy. In IFS, our minds are naturally multi-faceted and made of parts. Our goal is to understand these parts. We are not here to make them go away, to eliminate them, or tell them they are bad. We are simply here to understand, listen, and build a relationship.
In working with trauma, there is no need to go back into the experience and relive what happened in order to provide comfort and compassion to that little one who experienced the trauma. Often times, that isn’t what these parts need or want. Instead, we provide them with what they didn’t receive in the past - often safety, support, and acceptance.
Benefits and Advantages of IFS…
When working through trauma - instead of re-experiencing and ‘being in’ the traumatic event, like other exposure-based modalities, you are sitting with the part that holds the trauma story and are allowing it space to share whatever it needs with you. It is a gentle and compassionate process. We will always go at your, and your systems, pace.
Learn to see yourself as differentiated from your parts and behaviors - allowing for more compassion for yourself and your system.
Provides a normalizing, non-judgmental perspective on your internal world.
Learn how to access your Self energy - compassion, calmness, curiosity, courage, confidence, clarity, connectedness, and creativity.
Achieve balance, harmony, and wholeness in your life - internally and externally.
Learn to create and sustain communication between Self and parts. This allows you to ask the part to ‘unblend’ when a part is flooding or overwhelming the system. That way, you can be WITH the part instead of BE the part.
Gain more understanding of yourself and the way your system functions, which in turn allows for more compassionate understanding of those around you.
Gain better communication with your family, friends, and community through deeper understanding and compassion.