Complex trauma usually occurs as the result of repeated trauma experienced as a child, although it can result from experiences as an adult. It may come as a surprise, but research has demonstrated that psychological maltreatment is not only the most prevalent and earliest onset form of abuse, but also the most chronic form of trauma exposure in comparison to physical or sexual abuse. Psychological abuse in childhood is the strongest predictor of attachment problems (difficulties in interpersonal relationships), anxiety, depression, substance abuse, PTSD and chronic physical issues (e.g. gastrointestinal problems, migraines, fibromyalgia). Most strikingly, experiences of emotional abuse or emotional neglect have been found to carry the greatest “weight” or “toxicity” out of all forms of childhood abuse.
How Trauma Occurs During Childhood
From birth, children have a range of core needs that need to be met by their parents. These needs go beyond physical care and are vital for psychological and emotional development. Young children are not capable of meeting their own needs and depend on caregivers to provide them with a sense of love and nurturance, safety, autonomy, and self-worth. When core needs are not met in childhood or they experience abuse, children typically develop negative beliefs about themselves or others, and struggle with self-esteem, emotional regulation, and the ability to relate in interpersonal relationships.
Consequently, children who experience complex trauma need to develop coping strategies to deal with a difficult family environment, abusive or unavailable parents and overwhelming negative and confusing emotions. Such coping strategies, although allowing them to survive and move through life as they grow up, can become rigid, self-destructive, reinforce further negative beliefs, and persist through life much after they are needed or helpful.
Core Childhood Needs
The need for love, bonding and nurturance
The need for safety and stability
The need to freely and safely express your emotions
The need for autonomy and having the freedom to make personal choices
The need to feel competent and capableely and safely express your emotions
Coping strategies that become harmful over time
- Being in a constant state of hypervigilance and watching out for danger
- Inability to trust others, always on the lookout for hidden motives
- Social isolation and withdrawal
- Emotional numbness and shutting down feelings
- Substance abuse
- Rigid perfectionism and constant need for control
- Constant people pleasing and/or self-sacrificing
- Dissociation
- Regulating emotions through constant distractions
How Can Trauma-Informed Counselling Help You
Therapy provides education so you can understand what you are going through and why you struggle in certain areas. Having this knowledge will help normalise your symptoms, explain why you are experiencing them and reduce shame by creating a different way to relate to the trauma.
You will learn to build resources for modulating your autonomic nervous system arousal which may be occurring a lot of the time. While de-stabilisation reflects autonomic dysregulation, the antidote is learning skills to better self-regulate.
You can develop increased awareness of post-traumatic triggering and habitually activated coping responses. This and an increased ability for self-regulation allows you to problem solve and respond in healthy ways rather than be overtaken by automatic reaction.
Through counselling you can start to overcome the intense fear of rejection or closeness/ intimacy that results from disrupted childhood attachment and start asking for more and better in relationships. This includes recognising and re-working hypervigilence, mistrust, habits of avoidance, and fight or flight responses in relationships.