Complex Trauma Symptoms: Why They Don't Stop and What Keeps Them in Place

Written by Roland Bal

It is not easy to make sense of your complex trauma symptoms and what keeps them in place; however, it is vital to your recovery process to be able to make sense of and give meaning to what you are experiencing.

With a single-event trauma — a car accident, a surgery, an assault — there is a clear point of origin. The nervous system was overwhelmed by one event. With complex trauma, there is no single event. There is an environment. The stress is chronic, interpersonal, and often spans years of a person's life. When we talk about developmental issues where abuse and neglect — either psychological or even sexual abuse — happens over a period of time, then the responses become a lot more complex as well.

The effects of complex trauma are bounded by the story of what has happened to us; core emotions of fear, anger or sadness and a loss of control, a feeling of overwhelming helplessness. To put it simply, each trauma, be it developmental or incidental, will have at its core a sense of overpowering helplessness. The impact of that will breach the boundaries and sense of self.

Why the Symptoms Keep Cycling

Depending on the kind of trauma being confronted, there will be a core emotion which relates to the sense of overwhelming helplessness. Emotion that turns inwards is always coupled with shame, guilt or self-reproach and is related to the story of what has happened. Emotion that flows outwards is always coupled with blame and the story of what took place.

It is these coupled elements that keep trauma going, and which confuse emotion and the sense of helplessness into making the vicious cycle of complex trauma symptoms continue to circle like a revolving door. Understanding this mechanism is essential before asking what can be done about it. That observation itself starts preparing the ground to uncouple the separate elements, step by step, and begin resolution.

The Perpetual Cycle

Here is what the cycle often looks like from the inside:

I am hurting because I have been physically and psychologically abused, and that hurt has stayed with me over time. I have suppressed anger, a deep wound of loneliness out of a lack of love; therefore, I subsequently suffer from anxiety, depression, and lack of self-worth.

Now, I am constantly fighting with my symptoms. I tell myself I should be more assertive, get out of this, take action, and when I fail, I get upset with myself. I self-blame, feel hurt, and retreat again into loneliness until depression takes over. I might also cope through addictive behaviours or substances from time to time. And lastly, I might project that if I just have enough money, or have someone, or if the world was different, or if I can only understand the cause of my suffering, everything would be better for me.

So, my mind is continuously escaping and thus self-perpetuating its own state through constant reaction, and I keep telling myself I should do something because if I stop, things will be worse. I am locked into this perpetual cycle of suffering with apparently no way out through trying to overcome, through avoiding, wanting to force change, and through wanting to get rid of my past and emotions.

Suppressed Anger, the Fawn Response, and Anxiety

What I have experienced and see in my work is that often, because we need to survive, the core emotion gets repressed — which is often anger. We hold down our own voice, our own force, our own empowerment, and start to adapt or anticipate to the abuser in order to avoid further abuse.

So we get as a core emotion suppressed anger. And then, as a coping emotion, we get anxiety. This is very prevalent in our society, and I would link it directly to developmental issues that span a period of time.

What comes with that is not just fight, flight or freeze — at some point, the fawn response takes over. The anticipation of danger and the adaptation to it. The pleasing of the other. And that morphs into having anxiety later on in life, because your personal boundaries are not intact anymore. What is me and what is the other becomes blurred, because you have given yourself out to survive and respond to the circumstances.

There is often a lot of guilt around anger. The moment the person has been angry, it has been met with resistance or beatings or further abuse. So there is no healthy relationship towards anger. A large part of the work is to reestablish that — because anger, when suppressed, acts in on the sense of self, and when it becomes explosive, it attacks somebody verbally or physically. People either waver between those two extremes, or they stay stuck on one: the suppression of anger.

Renegotiating that relationship toward a healthy anger then becomes healthy boundaries, motivation, having a sense of self, being able to distinguish between what is me and what is the other. The objective is not to stimulate hatred or blame, but to allow the person to actually feel the force and the power of anger and to own that again.

The Role of Dissociation

Excessive thought, the insistence of finding out the "why?" of a particular emotion, feeling or experience, or the reaction of wanting to solve or get rid of it — these are dissociation responses. They are never going to help you bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be. The "where you want to be" psychologically is an illusion, and is flowing out of the very pain of where you are and your inability to meet that pain in the here and now.

The anger that was held is stored, in my experience, at that earliest time when the abuse occurred. And it is difficult for that person to let go of it because maybe that part of their personality kept them going. I am more interested in looking at the emotional aspects of the personality as serving a function, and how they can be brought to work together to reintegrate the person's personality, which has often become very fragmented.

Working Through It: Non-dual Awareness

Real change requires a different approach altogether. It requires a willingness to listen to your pain, to become intimate with it, to hold a state of non-duality in which you are not choosing one extreme over the other; in which you are neither fully identified and are becoming your suffering nor where you reject your suffering and your pain.

It is that very listening into the various complex layers of trauma, symptoms, and dissociation that helps you connect to the source of your emotional pain and, thereby, through adequate containment and resilience, you will start to process the emotional residue within and thus start to heal and integrate. The past will become a part of the past because you have fully met the emotional residue and worked through it.

Our personal traumas are what shape our outward society. You cannot separate them. They are intertwined, meshed up.

What You Expose Yourself To Matters

It is far too easy to be influenced by external input these days as we are constantly bombarded with information. If healing from complex trauma is one of your objectives, I think it is wise to think carefully about what you are exposing yourself to on a daily basis.

You most likely know by now that staying in a toxic environment where you are exposed to continued abuse is not conducive to healing. I would argue that extends to what you tune into for information, be it TV news, or social media. If you expose yourself repeatedly and deliberately to news which evokes fear, disgust or anger, you will become fearful, disgusted, and angry; these feelings will seep in and will become part of your reality.

Do cut out the news as much as you can or choose it very wisely. It takes so much more work to observe non-dualistically — to set your boundaries clearly regarding where you want to live, which people you want to have close to you, and what information you allow yourself to be informed by.

It is hard work — as it is hard work to go through complex trauma, its symptoms and layers of complexity — to shape your life according to a paradigm that is not based on the old. This applies both to your inner cosmos, the ways in which you have been dealing with your emotional residue, as well as dealing with the world at large. And they go together.

This world is made up of a mixture of so many realities defined by one's beliefs, convictions, and choices. If you understand that deeply then you know your reality is exactly that; it is made up of your beliefs, convictions, experiences, and choices. You can, therefore, be more fluid, forever questioning the nature of your reality and invite change. It is up to you to want to resonate with another paradigm and thereby bring another reality, another possibility of living into being.