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, and even how our body functions. There’s no corner of human life it doesn’t reach. And that’s overwhelming, because when you’re trying to understand it, or explain it to someone else, it can start to feel like you’re talking about everything at once.
At a certain point, I realized I needed a map. Not a map that oversimplifies or forces everything into neat boxes, but one that could contain the vastness of trauma’s effects—something that could help organize the chaos without denying its complexity.
After a lot of exploration, reflection, and testing, five main areas of impact began to crystallize.
These became the framework I still use today:
- Regulation Disruptions
- Relational Patterns
- Identity & Cognition
- Coping Behaviors
- Physical Health
These five aren’t random. They represent the main domains where the long shadow of childhood trauma shows up in adult life.
The Search for Containment
When I first began this work, I was drowning in the sheer number of ways trauma could manifest. One person might struggle with emotional volatility, another with chronic isolation, another with shame, perfectionism, or autoimmune disease. On the surface, they look like different problems—but at the root, they share the same origin: an early environment that forced the body and psyche to adapt to conditions they couldn’t control.
The question became: how do you hold all of that in a way that makes sense?
These five areas—regulation, relationship, identity, coping, and physical health—eventually revealed themselves as natural containers. They didn’t come from a textbook; they came from pattern recognition. Over time, I kept seeing how every form of suffering or adaptation could be traced back to one or more of these five.
Why These Five
1. They cover the full human system.
Trauma doesn’t just happen in the mind or the body. It happens through the entire system—nervous, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physical.
These five areas together give us a full map of the human being.
- Regulation speaks to our capacity to feel safe and stable.
- Relationship describes how we connect and attach.
- Identity and cognition describe how we make meaning and see ourselves.
- Coping shows how we adapt and survive.
- Physical health shows how all of it eventually settles into the tissues.
It’s the whole organism—body, heart, mind, and spirit.
2. They line up with what we know from trauma science.
If you look across trauma theory—polyvagal research, attachment studies, cognitive models, behavioral conditioning, psychoneuroimmunology—you see the same pattern repeated in different language. The nervous system dysregulates. Connection becomes unsafe or inconsistent. Identity fragments. Coping becomes rigid. The body eventually bears the load.
These five areas simply translate that universal pattern into human terms.
It Didn’t Come From Science — It Just Happened to Match It
It’s worth saying here that these five containers didn’t come from trauma science. I didn’t read a bunch of research and decide to organize things that way.
They came from what I kept seeing, over and over again — in myself, in others, in the clinic, in life. I was looking for a way to make sense of how trauma moves through a person — how it shows up in the body, in emotion, in thought, in behavior. I started noticing the same five fields of disruption repeating themselves, no matter the story or background.
Only later, when I compared this to what trauma science had been describing, did I realize the overlap. The research and I had arrived at the same landscape from different directions.
Science got there through studying the nervous system, brain development, and attachment. I got there through the Daoist body — through understanding how qi and spirit move, or stop moving, under chronic strain. Both maps describe the same terrain.
That’s the beauty of it: two entirely different ways of seeing the world landing in the same place. It means the pattern is real.
3. They fit the Daoist model of the body–mind.
For me, this framework also had to make sense through the Daoist lens.
Each domain corresponds to an aspect of the organ-spirit system:
- Regulation disruptions reflect the flow of qi itself—whether it moves freely or gets stuck.
- Relational patterns live in the Heart and Pericardium—the organs of connection and intimacy.
- Identity and cognition tie into the Heart–Kidney relationship—the bridge between conscious awareness and deep wisdom.
- Coping behaviors arise from the Liver and Gallbladder—the parts of us that adapt, decide, and assert.
- Physical health connects to the Spleen, Lungs, and Kidneys—the systems that sustain life, immunity, and endurance.
In other words, the same five domains that make sense psychologically also make sense energetically. They bridge East and West, inner and outer.
4. They’re experiential. People feel them.
This was important to me.
When someone says, “I can’t calm down,” “I don’t trust anyone,” “I don’t know who I am,” “I can’t stop controlling everything,” or “My body’s falling apart,”—they’re describing these five domains in everyday language.
They don’t need to know theory. They’re living it.
That’s what makes this framework useful: it meets people where they actually are.
5. They organize complexity without erasing it.
The five areas aren’t meant to be rigid boxes. They’re overlapping fields. Regulation affects relationship. Relationship affects identity. Identity shapes coping. Coping drives physical outcomes. It’s a web.
But having these containers gives us something to work with—a way to orient ourselves inside the complexity instead of getting lost in it.
The Sequence Matters
There’s also an order to how these impacts unfold.
Trauma first disrupts regulation—the body’s capacity to feel safe.
That disruption ripples into relationship—how we connect, attach, and trust.
Those experiences shape identity—how we think about ourselves and our place in the world.
From there, we form coping patterns—strategies for survival.
And eventually, all of it settles into the body as chronic physical strain.
It’s the same story told in every healing tradition: what begins as a subtle imbalance in the unseen layers eventually becomes visible in the body.
Closing Reflection
When I look back, I see that this five-part map wasn’t just a way to understand trauma—it was also a way to understand life.
Every person, whether they think of themselves as “traumatized” or not, lives through these five dimensions: regulation, relationship, identity, behavior, and health. Trauma just distorts them. Healing is the process of bringing them back into balance.
This framework became the backbone of my work because it’s comprehensive, human, and practical. It helps us name where trauma lives in us—and from there, begin the work of transforming it.
Author’s Note: An Integrative Lens
This framework didn’t begin in theory. It grew from lived experience—patterns that kept repeating in the body, the heart, and the stories people carried. Later I saw that trauma science was describing the same terrain from another angle. That convergence told me the pattern was real.
It’s not about blending two systems, but about seeing one truth through two lenses.
Understanding where trauma lives in us is the first step toward letting life move through us again.
