Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Normative Culture

I’ve been working on healing from Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) for 20 years and I still have struggles. My current struggles are nowhere close to what they used to be but even with the tremendous amount of work I’ve put into healing, there is not a day where I experience complete liberation from the damage my parents inflicted on me. Time does not heal all wounds. It takes time, effort and energy to heal wounds. Time doesn’t do the healing, we do.

When people point out how long ago the abuse happened it highlights both their privilege and their ignorance. It’s also insulting, erasing and minimizing. What normative culture fails to understand is that I’m healing from severe brain damage caused to me by the adults that were supposed to care for me. I’m significantly more aware of how much time has passed than they are. It has not gone unnoticed by me that the choice my parents made to abuse me has thoroughly negatively impacted my life for decades. I’ve grieved that loss many times over. 

The message normative culture regularly sends to trauma survivors is: Even though you’ve worked hard at healing, if you’re still experiencing the impact of the abuse it must be your fault that you’re not “better”. When normative culture says things like “time heals all wounds”, “wasn’t that a long time ago?” or “don’t let things that are out of your control get to you” they are shaming and blaming the victim of trauma for suffering.

Instead, what normatives should notice about trauma survivors working to heal is: We have not only survived what for some of us is decades worth of abuse, but we are also dealing with the longterm physiological, emotional and relational impact that abuse has had on us. We should be recognized for how hard we work to heal and that that work is making the world a better place. We also hold more tumultuous emotions, disturbing memories and physiological distress than normatives can imagine.

When normatives tell trauma survivors how trauma made them stronger (Spiritual Bypassing) they are glorifying, complimenting and then crediting trauma for our response to it.

Complex Developmental Trauma (CDT) gets woven into our brains. 

In childhood abuse-related complex PTSD, decreased gray matter concentration in the right hippocampus, the right dorsal ACC, and the right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was observed (Thomaes et al., 2010). These findings imply that complex PTSD may be associated with more severe neural imaging correlates than PTSD. An fMRI study on childhood abuse-related complex PTSD indicated altered activation of the left hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, suggesting hippocampal dysfunction (Thomaes et al., 2009). Furthermore, in complex PTSD disturbances in the activation of the left ventral ACC and dorsal ACC, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, left ventrolateral prefrontal, and OFC were observed, implying involvement of regions particularly important for emotional processing (Thomaes et al., 2013).

Other research shows:

Then there is the fascinating series of studies on telomeres, the protective “caps” at the ends of each chromosome that are necessary for DNA replication which in turn is essential for all living things, including humans, to keep living. 

Accelerated erosion of telomeres has been linked to exposure to complex childhood trauma and implicated in premature mortality in humans. 

Destin from Smarter Everyday took on a casual experiment– The Backwards Brain Bicycle: Undoing Understanding. This video explains it.

If this is the “algorithm” for riding a bicycle then think how many algorithms people with CPTSD have to re-write. Notice the complete concentration it took to ride the Backwards Bike even after he “learned”. Even after his brain clicked into the new pathway he was creating, any distraction made him fall. This is what people with CPTSD go through with everything. The mental algorithms for trauma, especially complex trauma, are WAY more complex than a bike. My mind was exhausted after therapy sessions. When I first began this work I often thought of my CPTSD brain as Kowloon Walled City. 

If you watch the Backwards Brain Bicycle video, maybe you will understand a bit better what it takes for a person with CPTSD to get healthy. Getting healthy has been and still is learning to ride countless reconfigured bicycles through life. It’s painfully and exhaustingly difficult. It is way more vulnerable than a gimmick bicycle. This is where the illustration falls apart because there is nothing meaningful lost if he never learns to ride that bicycle. Everything was already robbed from us, healing from CPTSD is our path toward being able to build a life of meaning for ourselves, healing our brains is the way we won’t lose more.

The Struggle to Be Seen: Understanding Life Beyond Normative Culture

Normative culture doesn’t understand the level of work it has taken and continues to take just to sometimes get through a day. To never have a break because either we can’t sleep or when we do we have nightmares and/or night terrors. Adults who were abused as children have to live with the consequences of that abuse every single day. Our nervous systems are completely different from normative ones. We’ve seen parts of the world, parts of humans that we can’t unsee. We will never fit in because we’d have to make ourselves so much smaller to do so. Normative culture thinks healing is making ourselves like them. It’s not. We know too much about life and ourselves to be normative. Our experience of life and humanity is bigger than what normative people experience. Why would we want to whittle ourselves down and be less? Wanting to be able to sleep, have a healthy hormone cycle, know what it feels like to be relaxed is not the same as wanting to be “normal”. I’m too strong to be normative. It’s like asking someone who climbed Mt. Everest to not be shaped by that experience. Instead of being shamed, silenced and marginalized for what we’ve been through, our experience should be met with curious questions. 

Instead many normative people, especially medical professionals, act like we’re stupid and don’t understand basic concepts. I cannot count the amount of times a non-trauma person, in particular my husband’s friends and family, has felt they had the right to psychoanalyze me simply because they are normative and I’m not. They don’t even have the respect or courage to talk to me about it. Instead they say it to Kendall. These people are not necessarily healthier than I am. It’s that their normative privilege gives them cultural permission to claim they are mentally healthy without question. It’s the same sort of discrimination, dehumanization and belittling behavior that any person that is disabled faces. We are not respectfully talked to but rather we are derisively talked about. 

Normative culture makes itself center stage. People who are shamed, silenced and marginalized are well aware of the normative experience because it’s constantly shoved down our throats and touted as the ideal. It’s the only experience allowed in most rooms. The ignorance isn’t on our part. It’s people constantly silencing the rest of us that are not only ignorant but actively working in order to maintain that comforting ignorance, that sense of being special and better, and all the associated power by shaming the rest of us into silence and kicking us out if we don’t comply. I’ve found that people with CPTSD that choose to engage with healing are some of the most interesting, smart and empathetic people I know. We tend to be better at being humans because we’ve had to work so hard for it and because we acutely understand the consequences of people who don’t. 

We didn’t choose the trauma that happened to us, but neither did many of the people I look to for wisdom. Yet, those of us who were abused are often judged and shamed because of the actions of another person. We have however chosen how to respond to that trauma and for that we are not given credit. Those of you who have experienced trauma and are now finding your way through life, you are hurt AND you are remarkable.

• Topics:
• Mental Health