Healing from complex trauma, or C-PTSD: ‘There’s a really beautiful and bright light on the other side’

This story was originally published in Group Therapy, a weekly newsletter answering questions sent by readers about what’s been weighing on their hearts and minds. A Group Therapy reader sent us a question about complex traumatic stress disorder, a relatively new diagnosis in psychology that’s thought to affect 1% to 8% of people worldwide: “I deal with chronic C-PTSD symptoms and am often in emotional flashbacks. Psychiatrist and scholar Judith Herman proposed the diagnosis in 1992 after observing that the PTSD symptoms outlined in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the diagnostic handbook used by mental health clinicians in the U.S., didn’t fully capture the challenges of people who’d been repeatedly exposed to trauma over months or years. “There’s not one silver bullet.” I asked this week’s experts to talk about how complex trauma can be healed. “We can also do this through body scanning, movement, stretching — whatever folks have access to in the moment to really calm their bodies, multiple times a day, to de-activate the stress response.” Processing old memories: Once you’ve become more attuned to your body, the next phase of healing is often processing old, painful memories associated with the trauma, Quirk said, ideally with a trained psychotherapist.