Tips from a CPTSD Therapist: How to Accept Love as a Trauma Survivor
Relationships can be challenging for folks with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Complex PTSD).
Past trauma can greatly affect your emotions and relationships, making them feel challenging and unsafe at times.
Here are 8 Ways the impact of CPTSD can appear in relationships:
1. Hypervigilance and Trust Issues
CPTSD can cause sense of hypervigilance and a heightened awareness of potential threats, leading to difficulties in trusting others. Survivors may struggle to feel safe and secure in relationships, often attributing their hypervigilance to past traumas.
2. Attachment Wounds
Trauma can impact how you form connections, resulting in insecure attachment styles like anxious, dismissive, or fearful. These attachment wounds can manifest as challenges in forming and maintaining secure, healthy relationships.
3. Emotional Triggers
CPTSD survivors may experience emotional triggers that stem from past trauma, causing intense emotional reactions in interpersonal settings. These triggers can disrupt communication, deepen emotional wounds, and create barriers to intimacy and connection.
4. Self-Worth and Self-Compassion
Experiencing trauma can lead to feeling less valuable and kind towards oneself. This can make it challenging to accept and believe in the love, care, and support of others. This can interfere with your ability to engage in reciprocal, nurturing relationships.
5. Communication Challenges
CPTSD can impact your ability to communicate needs, set boundaries, and express emotions effectively. This can result in misunderstandings, conflict, and difficulties in establishing open, empathetic communication within relationships.
6. Fear of Rejection and Abandonment
Past rejection, neglect, or abandonment can instill a strong fear of rejection or abandonment in current relationships. This fear can lead to behaviors that either push others away or create barriers to connection.
7. Relational Triggers
People with CPTSD may face triggers that remind them of past trauma, causing fear, shame, or feeling unworthy. These triggers can hinder the ability to engage in healthy, intimate relationships.
8.Impact on Intimacy and Vulnerability
Trauma can create barriers to intimacy and vulnerability, making it challenging for CPTSD survivors to engage in emotionally close, deeply connected relationships.
These factors can make it hard for CPTSD survivors to have secure and safe relationships.
So, as a survivor of CPTSD, how can you start accepting bids for love in relationships?
Navigating the process of healing attachment wounds is a significant aspect of embracing love as a CPTSD survivor.
Neglect, inconsistency, or other traumas from ptsd vs cptsd, can cause attachment wounds that impact how we form secure connections with others.
Here are some steps to support the healing of attachment wounds:
Exploring Attachment Styles
Click here for your FREE guide!
Understanding one's attachment style—whether it's anxious, avoidant, disorganized, or secure—provides valuable insight into relational behaviors and responses. By recognizing the patterns that shape attachment styles, individuals can consciously work towards fostering a more secure attachment framework.
Want to explore your attachment style? Grab our FREE guide here.
Creating Secure Internal Dialogue
Developing a nurturing and supportive internal dialogue is pivotal in healing attachment wounds. Practicing self-soothing, self-compassion, and affirming one's worth can help challenge and make shifts in negative self-talk caused by attachment wounds.
Mindful Self-Exploration
Doing some heady self-exploration can help you to unravel the roots of your attachment wounds. By understanding how early experiences affected attachment, you can develop self-compassion and change how you engage in relationships. No, this isn't so easy! That's why working with a complex trauma therapist or childhood trauma specialists is important!
Building Trust Through Consistency
Consistent and reliable interactions with trusted individuals can gradually rebuild a sense of trust and safety. Creating consistent support and care can build a strong foundation for close relationships and a feeling of stability. As a complex PTSD therapist, we believe that the therapeutic relationship can start doing just that.
Engaging in Relational Repair
When facing challenges in relationships, openly addressing concerns and practicing healthy communication can aid in repairing relational wounds. Engaging in constructive dialogue and working collaboratively towards resolution can strengthen trust and diminish attachment insecurities.
Exploring Attachment-Focused Therapy
Seeking childhood trauma therapy that specifically addresses attachment wounds can support your recovery from Complex PTSD. Therapies like attachment-focused therapy, EMDR therapy, and somatic therapy can help heal attachment trauma and build secure connections.
Practicing Emotional Regulation
Developing skills for emotional regulation is integral in managing triggers related to attachment wounds. Engaging in grounding exercises, practicing deep breathing, and utilizing healthy coping strategies can help navigate emotional turbulence and promote stability in relationships.
Fostering Secure Relationships
Cultivating relationships with individuals who embody secure attachment qualities can be profoundly beneficial. Observing and internalizing healthy attachment dynamics can create a template for navigating secure connections in one's own life.
Embracing Vulnerability
Practicing vulnerability in safe and supportive relationships fosters emotional intimacy and reinforces the gradual healing of attachment wounds. Embracing vulnerability allows for authentic connection and strengthens the foundation of secure attachments.
Healing attachment wounds takes time and may have setbacks, but every step toward secure connection, with yourself and others, is healing and is brave.
By leaning into self-compassion, mindfulness, and intentional communication, you can begin to heal even the most wounded parts of yourself in your recovery from childhood trauma. Identifying triggers can help create strong connections and feel safe in relationships. Finding people you can be open about feelings can also contribute to this.
And, seeing a complex PTSD therapist near me can support the development of experiencing a strong connection and feelings of safety in relationship.
Recovering from CPTSD and learning to accept love is a continuous and individual journey.
It involves understanding that healing attachment wounds takes time. Room for exploration, setbacks, and of course successes along the way. Each step taken towards healing reflects a commitment to owning your inherent worth as a human in the world. Because you are, and always have been, deserving of love and acceptance, just as you are.
Finding a therapist who understands Complex PTSD can be hard.
At Reclaim Therapy we specialize in providing Complex PTSD treatment, EMDR Therapy (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy in Pennsylvania) for traumatic experiences and eating disorder therapy in Horsham, PA.
Whether you're struggling with an eating disorder, mood dysregulation, self-harm, rocky relationships, perfectionism, people pleasing or a deep seated belief of unworthiness, we want you to know that we get it.
And, we have an unwavering belief that you are deserving of healing.
🧡,
Reclaim Therapy is a group of trauma therapists who provide therapy for childhood trauma, PTSD treatment, eating disorder treatment and grief counseling in Horsham, PA.
Our office is located in Horsham, PA and we provide online therapy in Pennsylvania via zoom.
Looking to get started with a new therapist?