My Journey Healing C-PTSD: From Surviving to Living

Every so often, life throws us a curveball so overwhelming we can’t fully process it; an abusive partner, parental neglect, horrific life events & more. We struggle to come to terms with what happened and get stuck living in the past, terrified of our current reality.

Most people are aware of PTSD, traumatic stress from acutely overwhelming events. However there’s also Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) which accumulates from chronic, lower grade stresses such as growing up in an abusive or neglectful home.

I struggled with C-PTSD stemming from emotional neglect & abuse from my dad from 2020-2025. When it first began, I felt trapped, overwhelmed and unsafe within my own house and body. I began dissociating, got extremely depressed and anxious, & even lost the ability to function at college.

It’s been 5 years since then, and while I still have the occasional anxiety attack, my C-PTSD is finally in remission! To celebrate, I wanted to outline the road I personally took towards recovery in the hopes it may help someone else. Alright, let’s do it!

Learn what is happening

You can’t treat a disease without understanding it’s pathology: why it begins, how it functions, and known treatments. At the beginning of my healing journey, I obsessed over learning everything I could about PTSD. I wanted to understand what was happening to me and how I could fix it. For this, I highly recommend reading The Body Keeps the Score and Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Also keep an eye out for newer material! There’s fresh research coming out all the time, these are just what helped me.

Besides learning how to heal, knowledge also gives you a sense of control and understanding over the pain you’re facing. When I first got hit with trauma, it was too much to bear. I started having panic attacks in which the world felt unreal and dissociation became my unwelcome best friend. I thought I was losing my grasp on reality, or even had a brain tumor. Learning about PTSD & C-PTSD helped me recognize my body was working fine: it was just reacting to extreme circumstances. I wasn’t losing my mind, my ability to empathize or suddenly super irritable: It was all because I was stressed, terrified and stuck fight & flight in the past.

EMDR & Brainspotting Therapy

Now that we have a baseline understanding of what’s happening, how do we treat what’s happening with me? You might’ve guessed with a therapist, and you’d be right with a caveat: the type of therapy matters. Trauma effects deeper, more subconscious parts of the brain that are near impossible to reach through conventional talk therapy. Trauma is an event so overwhelming that you cannot fully process it at the time, so it gets lodged in your brain like undigested oats. To reach & release them, we need to go deeper…

Introducing EMDR, and its newer child Brainspotting. These techniques use bilateral stimulation and eye placement to rapidly process and release emotions. I’d highly recommend finding a therapist in your area (searching psychologytoday.com is how I do it) who uses one of these techniques.

If you are unable to access a therapist, I’d recommend this book on EMDR. While we heal and grow significantly better in the presence of others, this book provides some exercises that you can do on your own.

One thing to note: This is a long process that involves feeling some strong, intense emotions. If you have emotional dysregulation due to unrelated conditions like ADHD, I highly recommend getting treatment for it simultaneously as it’s extra hard to feel emotions if they’re even more overwhelming than otherwise.

Inner Family Systems & Parts Therapy

Another useful therapy technique is IFS or Parts Work. It stems from the theory that there are multiple “parts” that make up who we are. A great example is how we all say, “part of me wants x but another part of me wants y”. I’ve found this therapy to be crucial to building self-compassion and very effective for releasing some fear-based emotions. No Bad Parts, written by the creator of IFS has a few self-guided exercises that helped me with this, allowing me to release some fears blocking me from developing my first game!

Yoga

A large part of our response to trauma can involve dissociation and disconnection from our physical bodies. I did this a lot, as my environment was unsafe at the time and I couldn’t escape otherwise. Yoga in that sense is the antithesis to these dissociative states: highly embodied and intentional, with strong sensory feedback and often accompanied by grounding music. The first 5 times I did yoga, I cried every time. Then, the tears slowly became less frequent. A great starting point is the youtube channel Yoga With Adrienne. She has a wonderful dog, inviting demeanor and all-around great sessions.

Neurofeedback

Another way our bodies are dysregulated with trauma is through our brainwaves. They can slow down, becoming more theta and delta dominant instead of alpha and beta. They could also get even higher in beta, associated with greater anxiety & hypervigilance. Neurofeedback therapy is an operand conditioning approach to shifting your brainwaves back to a regulated state. The cool thing about it is there’s no drug or stimulation being done on your brain: all the progress gets created subconsciously by your own brain! Neurofeedback can also help improve symptoms of depression, ADHD and anxiety. While it didn’t cure my ADHD, I do believe it strengthened my brain so it affects me less!

Unfortunately neurofeedback therapy is costly & isn’t often covered by insurance. However, for me it was more effective than EMDR and worth it. If you can afford an in-person clinic, do that. If not, one of the cheapest and most accessible programs that has helped me was Myndlift. You can do neurofeedback remotely an unlimited amount of times, and it genuinely does make a difference!

Guided Shrooms Journey

Everything else on this list helped so much for me. However, it felt like I was still a little stuck in my ways. I was always one disaster away from total social isolation and living in fear. Given my previous experiences, I decided to do a heroic dosage of psilocybin under the guidance of a mental health professional to help me process and break out of these old mental patterns. This is not for everyone. Don’t do this if you have a family history of psychosis or schizophrenia and only consider doing this with a mental health professional’s guidance. If I did this dosage on my own, I would’ve had a panic attack & I wouldn’t have reaped the healing benefits I got. I was lucky enough to be able to do this in Colorado where some professionals are starting to provide psilocybin assisted therapies. Combined with setting goals and reflection, and the years of work I did prior, this was the final push I needed to get back to my old self: genuinely empathetic and curious to connect with others and not seeing the world anymore as a terrifying, lonely place. If you’d like to here more about my journey, check out my blogpost on it here.

Move out & Move on

If your trauma happened at your home, I cannot overstate the importance of moving out. Our brains store memories and information through neural networks, a web of connections and associations. It’s why people have dedicated office spaces, why grandmas can remind us of apple pie and also why being at the site of your trauma alone can work to keep you stuck. I love my home, but whenever I return I feel my anxiety increase. It’s like my mindset begins to shift back to who I was when I lived there from association alone.

A huge part of trauma is being stuck in the past, and nothing helps more than moving out and moving on. Find new experiences in the present that captivate you, start socializing with others again, read a new book, pick up a new hobby. Anything that gets you into the present and out of the past. This will also help prevent you from identifying with the trauma and identifying as a victim. Those things may have happened in the past, but they aren’t who you are anymore! You aren’t your trauma, it was merely a chapter in your life that has passed. To move on, we must leave it in the past and live in the moment. That’s the difference between the survivalist mindset of trauma and actually living.

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

Recovering from trauma can be a long journey. It took me 5 years to get my dissociation and panic attacks mostly in remission, and recover my empathy, curiosity & drive for life. It’s all about consistently coming back to healing and moving on, even if you slip up from time to time. That’s okay. You’ve survived every one of your worst days, and as you put in the work, meet new people, turn the page to new chapters in your life you’ll one day find yourself thinking about it less and less until it finally fades into an emotionally neutral anecdote. You got this!

What resources have you found helpful for healing trauma? Leave them in the comments below!

With loving support,
-Juniper