Do you find it hard to trust?

Complex PTSD, Polyvagal theory, and EMDR
 
If you have grown up in a threatening environment, you have had to adapt to survive. These adaptations are characteristic of CPTSD (Complex PTSD). The trouble is, these adaptations can leave you stuck in certain states, whether that is fight-or-flight, freeze, or dissociative shutdown.
 
CPTSD often creates difficulties in your adult life, and these difficulties often impact your relationships. For example, if your caregivers only offered an abusive relationship involving shame or manipulation, you will find it hard to identify a healthy, balanced relationship. In fact, you will find it hard to trust someone enough to develop a healthy, balanced relationship. As psychotherapy requires a relationship between client and therapist, CPTSD can often serve as an obstacle in the early stages. To overcome these obstacles, a therapist must be experienced with CPTSD, they must be flexible in their approach, and they must expect a lack of trust in the early stages.
 
CPTSD: What can help?
 
Compassion: Symptoms of CPTSD are adaptations to a chronically unsafe environment that presented itself in the client’s past.
Polyvagal theory helps us to view these symptoms with compassion: Our body and brain is responding in a way that the nervous system is supposed to. When the nervous system senses danger, our heartrate speeds up, or we cannot think about anything but that perceived danger.
 
A somatic approach: Once we view our symptoms as a matter of biology (our body doing what it is designed to do), we realize that we cannot think our way out of this. Instead, we need a somatic approach which includes breathing, tapping, movement, and many more approaches.
You can also mindfully track your bodily responses to certain triggers, so you learn how to befriend these responses, rather than trying to attack them.
Sometimes this in itself won’t be enough, and so we might need something like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy) to help calm the amygdala. Only then can our more developed brain come back ‘online’.
 
Find cues of safety: With time and patience, you can build up a whole ‘filing cabinet’ of cues of safety. For example, there might be certain images or sounds or smells that calm your body and mind. Many people enjoy images from nature, but don’t limit yourself to this. Cues of safety could include the sound of your children laughing, your cat purring, certain calming colors, or even grounding (but calming) objects such as a hard-backed book, a woolly hat, or a jar of coffee beans.
Once you have identified your own cues of safety, you can repeat the mantra “I am safe now.” The key part of this is to distinguish the past environment of chaos and danger from the current environment of calm and safety.
 
To conclude
 
Every time you use a cue of safety, or you exercise compassion, or you use a somatic approach, you are “myelinating the neural pathways of your social nervous system” (Dr Arielle Schwartz). The more you do this, the easier it will become to get back into a safe and calm state. The purpose is not to eradicate all distress, nor avoid it, but to embrace it and ride the peaks and troughs of the experience.
 
I hope you find this useful. Please contact me if you would like to clarify anything.
You can also book online for a free call from me.
 
Chris Warren-Dickins
Trauma therapist in Ridgewood, New Jersey