Cognitive & Identity Disruptions: When the Story Turns Against You
There’s a particular kind of conflict many trauma survivors know well — the split between what you know and what you feel.You might know you’re not to blame for what happened. Yet some quiet part of you still believes you are. You might understand, logically, that you deserve love — but still feel unworthy when […]
Relational & Attachment Disruptions: When Connection Feels Unsafe
Some people long for closeness their entire lives but can never quite relax into it. Others keep their distance, even from the ones who love them most. Some cling too tightly, terrified of being left. Others vanish the moment things start to feel real. All of these patterns come from the same place: an early […]
How Personality Forms — and How Trauma Alters the Process
Most of us grow up assuming that our “personality” is simply who we are — a collection of traits, preferences, and habits that make us unique. But personality isn’t something we’re born with. It’s something that develops. It’s the shape our life energy takes as it learns to move through the world — a form […]
Understanding the Six Core Barriers (and the Many Faces They Take)
Even when we want to heal, something inside often pushes back.It might sound like doubt, resistance, distraction, or fatigue.Sometimes it’s quiet; other times it’s loud.But it always serves the same purpose—protection. Healing isn’t just about learning new tools. It’s also about understanding the forces that hold us back from using them. The six barriers explored […]
Why These Five: The Core Impact Areas of Childhood Complex Trauma
When I first started trying to make sense of childhood complex trauma—really make sense of it, not just as theory but as something that explains the shape of real lives—I ran into a problem. The problem was scope. Trauma touches everything. It affects how we feel, how we relate, how we think, how we cope, […]
Understanding the Downward Arc: How Survival Becomes Structure
Most trauma models describe what trauma does to us — how it dysregulates our nervous system, distorts our beliefs, or shapes our relationships. Others explain why healing is difficult — the fears, defenses, and resistances that arise when we begin to change. But few describe the process that happens in between: the slow, invisible transformation […]
Downward Arc: How Survival Becomes Struggle
There’s a point in every survivor’s story where what once kept us safe begins to keep us stuck.That shift — from adaptation to entrapment, from flow to fixation — is what I call the Downward Arc. The Intelligence of Survival Every pattern we carry began as a kind of brilliance.When we were children, our bodies […]
Coping Behaviors: How We Survive What We Couldn’t Control
When a child grows up in an environment that feels unsafe, unpredictable, or emotionally overwhelming, they have to find some way to survive it. The body, mind, and emotions all adapt in whatever ways they can to reduce pain, avoid danger, or preserve connection. Those adaptations are what we call coping behaviors — the learned […]
Core Definitions: The Language of Childhood Complex Trauma
Before you can heal, you have to name what happened.But most of us never had words for it. We grew up inside the fog of it — the tension, the confusion, the shame — so it all just felt like life. Maybe we knew something was off, but we couldn’t explain it. We didn’t have […]
What We Mean by “Caregiver”
When we talk about childhood complex trauma, we’re not just talking about what happened to a child — we’re talking about what happened in the space between a child and the people responsible for their care. That space — the caregiving relationship — shapes how we learn to feel safe, how we understand ourselves, and […]