An Integrative Approach for Healing CPTSD & Developmental Trauma
Did you know…
Most of us carry unhealed trauma from childhood.
Feeling anxious, depressed, lost, stuck, empty (often inexplicably) are very common experiences. We often mask over them, and don’t realise that the people around us are feeling them too. The available resources of individual is the mediating factor of traumatisation.
What They Don’t Tell you about Anxiety & Depression
The American Psychological Association (APA), which authors the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual (DSM-5 -TR) does not currently recognise cPTSD or developmental trauma. Many symptoms of depression, anxiety disorders, and personality disorders outlined in the DSM correspond with symptoms of cPTSD. These disorders therefore may be pointing to symptoms of trauma, rather than isolated disorders.
Healing and empowerment are inseparable.
In greater states of “healedness,” we naturally feel confident and purposeful. We can better know what we want to create in our lives, and easily give our energy to the creation. Fear, blame, and anger are more easily navigated, as challenges are confronted purposefully.
Healing and self-actualization are inseperable.
Everyone has the gifts of deep knowing, clear intuition, self-love, and ease of being. The challenge is to restore free and easy access to these states. The block? Emotional wounds. Becoming who you want to be, who you know you truly are, is a matter of healing.
Healing Trauma (cPTSD, PTSD, and Developmental Trauma)
Feeling empty, paralyzed, and chronically numb can be feelings that correspond with depression. While chronic fear, nervousness, hypervigilence, racing thoughts and hearts, often correspond with anxiety.
However, depression and anxiety may be signs of a deeper and often overlooked problem.
Hearing the message from the people around you to “buck up” or “shake it off” are entirely unhelpful. Will power is not the way through. These responses amplify self-blame, guilt, and even feelings of shame.
The truth is that even the most apparently self-destructive behaviour or negative feeling is a bid for well being. Truly.
What Goes “Wrong?”
No matter how many positive affirmations you make, how many times you tell yourself the ‘rational truth’, plan your success strategy, treat yourself to something nice, or go to the gym, the relief is often at best only temporary.
In the long run, these strategies don’t bring you the feelings of wholeness and worthiness that you intend. This apparent failure to be “happy,” is 100% not your fault. – it is however totally in your power and scope to heal.
There is a good reason why these techniques only work superficially. They do not clear the root cause of why you feel any combination of low, nervous, worried, reactive, hostile, empty, invalidated, powerless, out of control, helpless, or alone.
The rational mind, will power, and positivity are not the right tools for this healing job. To get out of these painful states and cycles, you need to dive into the belly of the beast and heal the root cause.
You might be surprised…
You are not the problem, not broken – do not fix. There is nothing missing or defective about you.
What you are experiencing as shame, depression, anxiety, instability, disorientation… is most likely an unrecognised developmental trauma.
This is the wounded inner child, crying out from the past.
In psychological terms, a constellation of unhealed childhood wounds is called Developmental Trauma, or cPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder). In Spiritual terms, being the carrier of multiple wounded inner children is called fragmentation of identity.
What is Developmental Trauma?
Trauma a subjective experience. This is one of the most important things to understand. Trauma has nothing to do with how apparently intense or harsh an event was to people observing it.
It has everything to do with how the adult, teenager, child, toddler, baby, feotus…. experiencing the event was resourced (both internally and externally) to stay safe, valuable, and in control.
Developmental Trauma is an emotional injury that stunts your natural growth. When we endure such an injury as a child, (for example being criticized often, punished too harshly, invalidated emotionally, ignored, controlled, or living in a toxic family home) it does three things when it remains unhealed.
- It freezes a part of our consciousness in that traumatising state and moment
- The emotions, sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and wounding of that moment become locked inside of us
- We lose touch with our authentic being, which leads to feeling insecure, angry, or disoriented
- We form relationships, make life decisions, and favour activities that are driven by the unhealed wounds rather than our authentic nature.
Most Developmental Trauma is Unconscious
Unhealed trauma leaves us feeling unresourceful and more vulnerable to future traumatisation.
We often don’t remember what happened, or why we feel the way that we feel. We just feel it. Fortunately, emotional pain in the here and now portal to the original event and the way to healing it. The reason it hasn’t happened yet is because without the tools or support to process the wounding event, it stays locked up inside.
Early life emotional wounding is trapped inside most of us, and relegated to the subconscious. We don’t remember why, but we feel ongoing negative emotion for no apparent reason… or have confusing reactions that we cannot control, that seem out of proportion to the external events.
When properly assessed, a single healing can lift a huge weight off by erasing the stored energy of an unhealed trauma. Healing a trauma from the original event collapses all the negative energy of following events that resonate on the original trauma.
Healing Developmental Trauma
Although the body has matured into its adult form with the passage of time, the unresolved wounds of the past are held within as energies that continue to radiate the frequencies of the wound. We can conceptualise this fragment, this trapped energy, this wound – as an inner child.
The goal of healing is integration. We want to integrate the fragments of our consciousness (the lost and wounded inner children that each represent an emotional wound) back into a whole.
We want to bring the pieces of ourselves back into wholeness.
When we access the past trauma and heal it, we can shut off the ‘trauma alarm.’ The scattered mind and negative states are replaced with a feeling of security. In other words, you restore your natural path.
A trauma is frozen energy.
Parts of you are frozen in the past. This is called fragmentation. Not all of you is here and now, and not all of your power and resources are ‘here and now’ which interrupts your ability to self-actualize.
Negative states and emotions that are rooted in developmental traumas can be difficult to release, because we are either used to them, subdued by them, or resigned to them as they have become the seeming norm.
This new norm is actually a distortion, that makes it difficult to experience natural states of happiness, security, and purpose. A negative repeating pattern in life, a chronic negative emotional experience, unresolvable symptoms of anxiety, depression, and even adhd as well as ongoing interpersonal conflicts or fears, addictions, life blocks and dream blocks are all possible signs of developmental trauma.
Healing is a gradual process. Every healing process that you do restores your original wholeness. There is no prescribed way to heal. In fact, different people will require different processes, be drawn to different techniques or schools of thought, and ultimately are able to heal.
I love to combine energy healing with psychotherapeutic work to resolve symptoms of depression and anxiety, and release trauma therapeutically and energetically, helping people to recover their natural resources and effectiveness.