Interpersonal Trauma

For those who grew up in environments that were chronically critical, invalidating, lonely, dismissive, insulting, or all of the above, navigating life can often feel like stumbling through the world wounded by invisible cuts and bruises. Such experiences can often develop into complex trauma, or C-PTSD.

Interpersonal trauma can occur in the context of relationships with parents, caregivers, and authority figures that consciously or unconsciously utilized emotional abuse and emotional neglect.

Over time, a variety of painful and self-limiting beliefs and patterns can result from prolonged emotional abuse or neglect. Common reactions are:

  • Living with chronic shame, self-doubt or self-hatred

  • Identifying as damaged, defective, inadequate, or unworthy of love

  • Feeling invisible, insignificant, or alone in the world

  • Lacking a sense of self or identity

  • Believing they take up too much space in the world

  • Never feeling competent

  • Not feeling like an adult

  • Experiencing the world as unsafe or unpredictable

  • Experiencing others as hard to trust

  • Finding difficulty asking for help or support

  • Believing the world is functioning around them or better off without them

What is emotional neglect?

A form of childhood psychological maltreatment in which a caregiver(s) fails to respond adequately to a child's emotional needs. This can involve a lack of emotional support, validation, responsiveness, or affection. It’s a pattern of repeated acts in which caregiver(s) ignore the child’s calls for attention/connection and abandon their child to unmanageable amounts of fear.

What is emotional abuse?

A type of interpersonal trauma that involves the perpetration of harmful and often intentional acts such as bullying, terrorizing, coercive control, and threats of violence or abandonment. This often but not always involves expressions of verbal abuse, including insults, belittlement, mockery, verbal intimidation, and shaming. Most often perpetrated by parents or other adults against children in their care but can occur in the context of any ongoing relationship, including but not limited to intimate partner and peer relationships, elder care, teacher-student relationships, etc.

Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD)

 

Traumatic events that are more likely to cause complex PTSD are as follows:

1. Childhood abuse: Childhood abuse can include physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. It can also include physical neglect, such as a lack of adequate food, shelter, and medical care, and emotional neglect such as lack of affection and warmth, ignoring emotional needs, withholding attention, enmeshment, or overinvolvement.

2. Self-esteem issues: People with C-PTSD may struggle with feelings of shame, guilt, powerlessness and a sense of being damaged or broken, which can impact their self-esteem and self-worth. Repeated traumatization also results in deep-seated changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors related to safety, trust, intimacy, and control.

3. Emotional dysregulation: This can look like rapid mood swings or extreme emotional responses that seem disproportionate to the situation. May also have heightened emotional sensitivity, meaning they feel emotions more intensely than others.

4. Relational difficulties: C-PTSD can impact an individual's ability to form and maintain healthy relationships. Adults may unconsciously seek out relationship that mirror their childhood experiences, leading to cycles of emotional neglect or unhealthy dynamics.

C-PTSD is caused by exposure to prolonged and repeated traumatic events, particularly those that are interpersonal in nature and involve a loss of control and a sense of powerlessness.

Repeated exposure to traumatic events can lead to changes in the brain and nervous system, including alterations in the stress response system and the development of maladaptive coping strategies.