Healing Complex Trauma, Part I: The Path to Self-Awareness

At its base, complex trauma represents an ability to exist in pieces—an adaptive preservation of Self at any cost.

We stop cooperating with our “selves.”

We adapt to each imperfect system (i.e., family of origin) by internalizing the system rulebook and policing ourselves to enforce the system rules.

To maintain relationship with caregivers and preserve Self long enough to survive childhood, we contain parts that do not “fit” the system.

We dis-integrate. Self organizes against Self, and we become walking dualities: the containing versus the contained. It happens automatically, with extreme reactions happening in extreme adaptations.

This is the complexity of complex trauma: “missing experience” creates an inability to heal, yearning for unmet needs while protecting against them.

Just as we internally separated parts that seek connection from parts that seek safety, we push externally against whatever we need most in life because there is no agreement.

When ongoing threat remains familiar—when it lives within our homes, and becomes just another layer of everyday experience—we adapt to it.

Even as infants, we track and respond to nonverbal cues of caregivers. We see their responses to various emotions, and we learn to contain whatever triggers them to fight, flee, or disappear.

We adapt to their system and separate from our bodies to avoid exiled, “unwanted” parts of Self. In this, we also separate from sensory information, becoming insulated against new input and trapped in the adaptation.

In order to adapt to the system, we become the system.

We absorb and recreate our caregivers internally. If caregivers judged us, we judge ourselves. If they dismissed or diminished us, we do the same. If they did not know how to see us, we do not know how to see ourselves; we struggle to notice or articulate internal events. We often go into life not knowing how to regulate our bodies (or how to notice basic signals such as thirst).

And while the dis-integration proves successfully adaptive, there remains a subtle knowing: a felt experience of disconnection, a gentle reminder that some part of us yearns to be remembered and reunited once safety is established.

This is just a lens, a way to begin observing our own internal conflicts, differentiating one side from another: one part judging, one part receiving that judgment and feeling it.

This automated containment system protects us from punishment (fight) or abandonment (flight) of others within our original family system(s).

The containing side attempts to diminish because the other side is amplifying, because it is trapped and simply wants attention. The contained side amplifies because the containing part is attempting to diminish. And so goes the dance.

We land, sometimes, on either side of the conflict. Sometimes we’re the contained part, feeling our own unmet needs on top of feeling trapped. Other times we are that containing part, wanting to survive and meet needs, knowing that if the contained part escapes we will face punishment or abandonment.

The complexity of complex trauma.

Wanting to take care of /nurture unmet needs while protecting against them.