The Life-Changing Effects of Complex Trauma

Posted by Rob A on August 21st, 2019

More recently, the mental health community has broadly accepted complex posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) as a legitimate condition. Complex trauma can come from many types of situations that encompass uneven power dynamics, such as indentured servitude, kidnapping, or intimate partner violence. Many symptoms resemble those of posttraumatic stress and borderline personality disorders. But its chief distinction is its prolonged nature.

Recurring maltreatment is the theme here, and often something so profound can only receive proper attention in complex PTSD treatment centers. They employ specialists who can treat the problem at its source, addressing the underlying prolonged trauma. Chronic maltreatment often results in a multilayered disorder because it usually comes with depression, anxiety, addictions, somatic symptoms, dissociation, and other issues, quantifying its complex nature.

Schemas, Modes, Triggers, and Personas

Internalized schemas develop in everyone at an early age, comprised of deeply ingrained feelings and beliefs about the self, others, and relationships. Modes develop internally as a response to schemas, and they’re made up of personas that people create during traumatic experiences, utilized as compensatory protectors. Some can be warm and gracious, while others can be narcissistic and nasty.

Everyone operates in modes, but some modes have devastating triggers that cause some people to regress maladaptively to past emotions and traumatic experiences. Whenever someone experiences something that reminds them of upsetting or traumatic duress they endured, it can trigger a schema whereby a mode comes into play to protect that unbearable emotional pain.

It may be shame, humiliation, anger, fear, desperation, emptiness, or other feelings. Feelings of abandonment and neglect as a child, for example, may conjure over-compensatory measures and dissociation. These protective behaviors are akin to modes stuck in early developmental stages, but they’re meant to protect from feelings of vulnerability and helplessness.

Treatments

When it comes to complex PTSD treatments, one of the first and most helpful steps is to identify the various modes within someone’s psyche. Some distinct personas include the Entitled, the Rager, the Detached Observer, the Rebel, the Victim, the Liar, the Seducer, the Partier, and so many more. These personas arise from a scheme triggered by perceived threats in the environment. With its complexity, many personas attempt to act normal and are often artful at obscuring dysfunction.

Having a good therapist can help someone identify their schemas, modes, triggers, and personas and make them a cohesive whole. A therapist won’t help eliminate someone’s protectors, but rather embrace them and incorporate them into a sense of a unified identity. Once identified, a therapist can help the patient pinpoint the underlying threatening schemas and lessen the blow of the triggers.

The goal of therapy at complex PTSD treatment centers is to integrate different personas into an adaptive, cohesive whole and challenge the underlying maladaptive beliefs of someone who experienced complex trauma.

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Rob A

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Rob A
Joined: April 10th, 2019
Articles Posted: 85

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