Growing up with childhood complex trauma can be particularly unsettling as it’s so simple to lose connection with your inner world and not even recognize that it happened.

You may spend years feeling unclear about what you want, or feeling engulfed in haziness or numbness.
You might struggle to identify your feelings, trust your instincts, or choose what’s best for you.
The most terrible aspect? You come to believe it’s only you.

But you’re not alone.

This is what happens when your nervous system gets conditioned to give everyone else’s needs first priority over your own.
When paying attention to how you feel never made anything better—just made you feel more vulnerable, more exposed, or more alone.

Roots of Separation

So you disconnect.

Not because you’re damaged.
And not because you’re feeble.
But as a child, because tuning out seemed safer.

You learned to shut down those emotions if your sadness was met with silence, your anger got you punished, or your enthusiasm made someone uncomfortable.
You learned to be cautious.
To always be pleasant.
To scan the room rather than checking in with yourself.

You became acutely conscious of the needs of others, and almost oblivious to yourself.
It wasn’t a deliberate choice.
Survival’s what it was.

An Expensive Strategy

But the cost of that survival strategy is steep.

Over time, you begin to realize that you often don’t truly know how you feel.
Decisions may be difficult since you lack clarity on what you truly desire.
You think too much on everything.
And you’re constantly seeking counsel from others.
You seek answers outside of yourself, while inside feels like static.

You may even feel cut off from your own body.
You might go hours without recognizing you’re thirsty, or hungry.
You could not realize how tight your shoulders are until they are locked up.
Perhaps you feel nothing at all until you reach overwhelm or total shutdown.

Cutting Off & Tuning Out

This is what relational trauma does.

It teaches you to forsake your own experiences.
To cut yourself off from the things—emotions, sensations, desires—that enable you to negotiate the world.
Tuning into such things didn’t help when you were younger.
They may have even made things worse.

Your body and mind began to believe: “It’s safer to not feel.”

The problem is, though.
Being cut-off from yourself prevents real healing.

Without knowing when something feels wrong, you cannot create boundaries.
Not knowing what needs are prevents you from fulfilling them.
Ignoring your inner compass for your whole life makes that same compass impossible to trust.

Reconnecting

The work now is reconnection.

Not all at once.
Not in any great, breath-taking change.
But little by little—via one breath, one moment of honesty, one small act of tuning in.

Begin with the body.
Begin with a pause.
Begin with, “How do I feel right now?”—even if you lack a response.

This is not simple work.
It’s awkward. It’s strange. At first, it could even seem dangerous.

But it’s worth the effort.

Because beneath all the numbness and noise, you remain still in there.

None of your feelings, instincts, or voice has vanished.
They simply became quiet.
Buried under years of survival.

But now you can gently begin to listen once again.

One slow, chaotic, lovely step at a time, you get to rebuild your relationship with yourself.