If you identify with having gone through childhood trauma and you're experiencing CPTSD symptoms, you're probably already familiar with the usual symptomology of things like depression and anxiety and body memories which are akin to flashbacks, things like irritability, numbness, isolation. And there's this usual list of stuff where we get when we do a quick Google search and there's a general kind of good enough consensus about what these symptoms are. But as a childhood trauma therapist, I see that there's more to the usual and those lists of symptoms can sometimes leave you feeling confused or they're a little bit vague or they're not really connecting the dots. Diving right in, here are three unnamed CPTSD symptoms related to childhood trauma that I see in my work that might give you some insight and connecting more of those dots about how you present as a human in the world and how it relates to growing up in abuse and neglect.
Number one is what I'm calling simply perception problems. I think of this one as really my number one definitive issue about childhood trauma. I haven't had a client yet, including myself, who didn't struggle with perception problems. And we could simply define childhood trauma as abuse of perception in children and lack of connection with healthy caregivers. Problems of perception involves how we perceive ourselves, how we perceive others, how we perceive the chain of events and situations in the present. Think of it as how we tend to make sense of things or find meaning in the present but based upon what happened to you in your past, i.e. childhood. Here is what the problems of perception might look like: things like reading a work email too quickly and reading it from your trauma narrative and now the team hates you and you really messed this thing up, but then you go back to the email a few minutes later and you realize that it wasn't even about you. Or you might go to a restaurant and hear laughter from a nearby table behind you and your inner child feels like the laughter is about you somehow. Another big one is you get involved with romantic relationships or friendships and you misread flags about the person and you don't pick up on toxic behavior. Another is misreading quick subtle things like you go to a party, you see two people talking and your inner child reads them as being disinterested in you when they're engaged in a conversation. Another is being overly empathic when someone is in pain or distress and you perceive yourself as somehow being the cause of it. Lastly, it is consistently perceiving that you're unwelcome or excluded by groups. I'm not saying all of these issues are just in our heads and not based in actual reality — it's more complicated than solely being about our triggers. But our system, our trauma system, is also looking to confirm that we're not safe.
So why do we have such problems in getting ourselves or others or events possibly wrong? Abuse of perception happens when we don't grow up in a safe emotional home base provided by a sane person who has a good grip on reality. In fact, our whole development from say zero to twenty-one in the abusive family system is essentially like one long gaslighting experience. And I think children are born emotionally intelligent and healthy engaged parents cultivate and develop that intelligence into raising a well-adjusted, well-rounded, emotionally balanced human. And if you're like me, due to being gaslit about reality by growing up in toxicity, you're definitely going to carry some biases into your adulthood, especially around what you perceive others to think of you. Here's how perception problems originate in childhood: one parent had this unsafe rage about them and the other parent minimized that to the point that the rager's mood became normalized. Or your parents didn't seem to really like each other yet they kept plugging away at that marriage. Or being a scapegoat or having a sibling that was the better child — the abuse of perception is being told that you're bad when the reality is that the abusive parents need a bad guy, a rescuer, and a victim. When adults ignore consequences of abuse or dysfunction, that is to abuse a child's perception. As children, we had to accept whatever the abusive parents' interpretation of reality was and therefore we lost our own innate intuition and our compass and our gut reactions.
What to do about this perception problem: I think reclaiming our natural given perception is going to be about having sane people around us that we can bounce things off of. I had an excellent therapist who could ask me what I really think, or noticed when I was going into a trauma place. And then I got into groups with healthier people who became like family and we did that for each other — like, am I off here? Is this coming from my trauma or am I right about this? There's a lot of great inner child work to do about this, but our inner adult has to buy into the idea that sometimes we'll get things twisted because of our trauma. Sometimes you trust your gut and sometimes you don't, but having a healthy sounding board is really helpful.
The second unnamed symptom is what I'm calling a compromised emotional imbalance. There are a range of say six to ten basic human emotions that we're all born with. You can look up Paul Ekman who identified six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. I like the following: anger (things like fury, outrage, wrath), sadness (grief, sorrow, gloom, melancholy), fear (anxiety, apprehension, nervousness), joy (enjoyment, happiness, relief), interest (acceptance, friendliness, trust), surprise (shock, astonishment, amazement), disgust (disappointment and judgmental feelings), and shame (guilt, embarrassment, chagrin, remorse). Now let's connect those innate feelings to trauma. Say a seven-year-old is raged at by an abusive parent, a dysregulated adult. That child will most likely go into the freeze response. Emotionally dysregulated adults are beyond what a child's nervous system can handle. So freezing is not just waiting for the storm to pass — it's also a strategy of repressing or burying emotions such as shame or fear or anger while waiting for the storm to pass.
During development with unsafe caregivers, repressing intermittent feelings becomes part of the game. They don't fully go away; we're just disconnected from them. And then it becomes habituated to not having those emotions serve us in a natural biological way. So the seven-year-old has to displace and disconnect from some emotions such as fear, anger, surprise, shame, disgust. But the kicker is: once we disconnect from one of our innate emotions, the others get compromised. A child growing up in violence and emotional abuse will appropriately disconnect with anger or injustice, but they might grow up into an adult who doesn't feel disgust when they're being treated unfairly. They might later feel an exorbitant amount of shame which clouds their perception. It would be really cool if the child could disconnect from the shame and fear and sadness but hold on to the joy or the interest or the disgust — but it doesn't work like that.
A well-adjusted person's innate emotions hover at an ideal capacity in their life. When situations come up, they have an appropriate range and a reasonable amount of the emotion for the moment. They have an appropriate amount of shame and remorse for mistakes. They can experience joy and spontaneity and excitement. They can be pranked without going to a big place of rage. They can go through a breakup without becoming suicidal. They can be afraid of something like a layoff but have faith that things will work out. With anger, they have enough of it to tell somebody off while maintaining control. With disgust, they can be turned off by red flags with someone they're dating.
Now look at an adult with CPTSD. Notice the deviation from ideal capacity. There are emotions that are off the chart in excess — what I call hyper — and emotions in deficit, which is hypo. The chart reflects an individual with an abundance of shame, surprise, sadness, and fear, and a deficit of buried emotions of joy, anger, interest, and disgust. Coming back to that seven-year-old who was raged at: the biological survival strategy of the freeze response affects all of these emotions which are thrown into an imbalance over time during development. The child goes into their room and starts to hate themselves for causing the upset — leading to an abundance of shame. They become preoccupied with not making the same mistake again — abundance of fear. Along with the sadness of believing that they are an unlovable kid who caused all of that. On the other end: joy is buried because joy is not safe. Anger is gone because it's not safe with a dysregulated parent. Interest gets muted because wanting things might set the parent off. Disgust is gone because no one is helping the child with the reality that it's the parent who is off, not the child.
What keeps a person stuck in this imbalance is unprocessed family of origin trauma. Getting into treatment — doing group work, interpersonal group work, experiential group work — telling your story through a genogram, doing anger work and grief work, gradually brings you back into balance emotionally. We have these compromised emotions because we have business to finish with our family system. I don't think one can really do a quick hack or a journal entry to fix these imbalances. I recommend things like somatic therapy, EMDR, grief work, or group work aimed at childhood trauma work.
The third symptom is what I'm calling a vacuum relational experience. I mean a vacuum as in the absence of air in a defined space. The relational part of this symptom is the idea of separateness that the childhood trauma survivor feels from others and from self during differences in emotional or perceptive experiences. We experience disconnection by not being on the same page with others or even being on the same page with ourselves. What I'm describing here is a dissociative experience when our reality is questioned. Years ago I would be so caught up in work, taking things way too seriously, and coworkers would be like, "Dude, you're really intense right now, are you aware of that?" And I'd go into this weird dissociative vacuum because I wasn't connected to my own intensity. Have you ever been told that you're way too serious or too intense, yet in your mind you're just getting through your day? Have you ever been told the opposite — that you're so calm and chill but you're literally on fire on the inside?
Another example: let's say myself and another server started sharing first impressions of a new restaurant manager. If I perceived the new manager as fake and dismissive, but the other server found them to be funny and lovely, I would then experience that untethered feeling and get triggered by that different experience. We weren't on the same page, and I'd go into that vacuum. Vacuum relational experiences are akin to what it feels like to be gaslit — I'm not saying you are being gaslit, I'm just saying it feels that way. It's really about how we have this symptom that makes us dissociate when others don't experience the world like we do or when people give us feedback about our emotions that are brand new to us.
Some examples from childhood: Mom is finally going to leave the abusive boyfriend after you pleading with her for a year, the big day comes, and then she actually made up with him. Then she pretends like she never had such conversations with you. Do you think a child would feel untethered from reality? Or being scapegoated and having your graduation or birthday canceled over minor offenses while the sibling gets all the attention. In all of these examples, there's big disconnections over reality and this symptom of going into that dissociative place often has a vibe like "wait, what?" The vacuum relational symptom is a sign that you're triggered, and I'm suggesting that we shouldn't need such confirmation as much as we do — that's the inner child piece.
So some final thoughts: the three interconnected symptoms are perception problems (which make it tricky to trust our gut), compromised emotional imbalance (directly related to having hyper amounts of fear, anger, shame, or joy, and hypo amounts of others), and vacuum relational experiences (when we're not on the same page with others and lose our gravity). Going into the vacuum is telling you that you're going through a family of origin trigger about your perception or your compromised emotions that need to be healed due to unprocessed trauma. I hope this video was helpful to you. May you be filled with loving kindness. May you be well. May you be peaceful and at ease. And may you be joyous.
