Hello and welcome to the EMDR Doctor podcast. This is a podcast for clients where I share and explore information about all things EMDR.
My name is Dr Caroline Lloyd. I'm a mental health GP and an EMDR practitioner. And my goal is to demystify EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to help you on your EMDR journey. EMDR is a powerful therapy, which helps to reduce the distress from difficult memories. And my goal is to make it accessible to everyone. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Hello, welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr. Caroline Lloyd and today we are diving into a topic that I believe needs more attention. Complex PTSD or CPTSD as it's often called. wanted to talk about this because often I see clients who come to me thinking that they just have PTSD or maybe that they just have depression or that they're just not coping. Maybe they think they've got anxiety, but their experience is actually much broader and more complex. So they may have been struggling with relationships their whole life, always feeling like they're walking on eggshells, never quite able to trust people.
And they don't really know that this could be related to their early experiences in life. So what exactly is complex PTSD? So PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, typically develops from a single traumatic event like a car accident or an assault. And complex PTSD usually stems from prolonged or repeated trauma, especially during childhood, but not limited just to childhood experiences.
It also involves trauma that is perpetrated by a caregiver or by a trusted person. So it's relational trauma and it includes an element of betrayal. Think about experiences like ongoing childhood abuse, neglect, or growing up in an environment where where you never felt safe or valued, where adults let you down.
The complex thing about CPTSD is that it affects people in ways that go way beyond the classic PTSD symptoms that we're all familiar with. Yes, there might be the flashbacks, the nightmares, and that constant feeling of being on high alert, but CPTSD adds a whole other layer of challenges that affect how we see ourselves and how we relate to others.
So we'll break this down a little bit. With CPTSD, people often struggle with three main areas that we don't typically see in regular PTSD. First of all, there's the emotional regulation. people may find it really hard to manage emotions, feeling like they're The emotions are completely overwhelming or just being totally shut down.
It's like having an emotional thermostat that's either stuck on maximum or minimum and, and they don't have that middle in between bit. Second is how you see yourself. And this one is, is really interesting. Quite heartbreaking. So people with CPTSD often carry this deep seated belief that they're fundamentally broken or unlovable or worthless.
And these aren't just passing thoughts. Most people will have these thoughts from time to time, but these are really firmly held beliefs and they often feel like absolute truths that have been carved into stone. And with those beliefs come often. unbearable shame and self blame. And thirdly, there's relationships.
And this is where things get really tricky because CPTSD can make maintaining close relationships incredibly challenging. So people find themselves constantly expecting betrayal. They have trouble trusting others, an enormous fear of abandonment or have of being left or discarded or feeling like you need to keep people at arm's length in order to stay safe.
So this is like an overly detached or overly competent kind of adaptation to avoid having to rely on others. some of my clients describe it as always waiting for the other shoe to drop, even in perfectly healthy relationships with people that they know that they can trust. They know that person is trustworthy.
They just can't actually do the trusting part of it. Sometimes CPTSD can be associated with other issues that arise from trauma, like dissociation, self harm, suicidality, eating disorders, substance use, and all of these are coping techniques that arise from the pain of those early experiences of harm.
Now here's something important that I want you to hear. If you're experiencing these things, you are not alone and you are definitely not broken. These responses made perfect sense as survival strategies when you were in that traumatic environment. Your brain and your body did exactly what they needed to do to protect you.
The problem is these strategies that once kept you safe might now be holding you back from the connections and the relationships and the life that you really desperately want. So what to do about it? One of the things I love about EMDR therapy is how effectively it can address complex PTSD. And those deep seated beliefs about being unlovable or worthless, EMDR is particularly good at getting to the root of these beliefs and helping to transform them. And here's why EMDR works so well with complex PTSD. It's not just about processing individual traumatic memories, although it does that beautifully. It's about addressing the patterns of belief and emotion that got laid down over time.
With EMDR, we can work on both the big, obvious traumas and And the small T traumas that might not look like big T trauma, but still shaped how we see ourselves in the world. What we can learn, we can unlearn. Those beliefs about ourselves, about not being good enough or too much, or unlovable, or shameful, we learned those from somewhere.
No baby is born with those beliefs. And what we can learn, we can unlearn. We just go to those early memories and we work in themes or chunks of memory networks. We work through the emotion of them and then we are free to know something much better and more whole and more sound and more safe about ourselves.
The beautiful thing about working with CPTSD is when we start processing these experiences we often see improvements across multiple areas of life. It's like untangling a knot, or like a, a, a, like a big knot, like a big bundle of string that's all tangled in a big lump. Once you start working on one strand, other parts naturally begin to loosen up too.
Relationships might become easier to navigate. Emotions might feel more manageable. And that harsh inner critic might start to quiet down. And then you have less need for the compensatory mechanisms. The alcohol or the self harm or the suicidality, whatever, has been coming out of those difficulties. So, um, If you are recognising yourself in what I'm describing today, please know that healing is possible.
Yes, complex PTSD can feel overwhelming, and yes, it affects many aspects of life, But I've seen many clients make incredible progress in their healing journey. The patterns that were laid down through trauma can be rewired through EMDR and we can develop new, healthier ways of relating to ourselves and to others.
And I just want to, Add a little addendum here. So although EMDR can be fast, it is not an instant fix, especially with CPTSD. Things can take time to see general improvement. And we need to get to a kind of a tipping point of having resolved enough of the trauma to believe enough of the good things. So I don't want to over promise and under deliver.
I want to give you a balanced view of what's achievable in any certain timeframe. So, like with all of my podcasts, please do not take this as individual medical advice, as each person is unique in their own experience of life. And if you are curious about how EMDR can help you with your individual circumstances, either talk to your own therapist, or seek out a good EMDR therapist near you, or feel free to reach out to me and we can have a chat about what your specific needs are.
But for now, just remember that your response has made sense given what you went through, and there is hope for healing and change. You are not broken. You are someone who survived and with the right support you can move on from just surviving to truly thriving. So that's all for today's episode. Hope this has been helpful to you.
Take good care. I'll talk to you next week.
