The Complex Trauma Podcast

Ever leave a therapy session looking totally fine, then spend the next three days clenching your jaw, snapping at everyone, and wondering if you’re just bad at therapy? Or find yourself completely checked out mid-session with no idea how long you’ve been gone?

In this episode, I answer two listener questions about feeling worse after EMDR and dissociating in therapy sessions. We talk about why therapy can stir so much up when you have complex trauma (CPTSD), the difference between being stirred up and being flooded, and what an EMDR session for complex trauma looks like...

Why do we keep reliving the same painful patterns, even when we can see them coming? In this episode, psychotherapist and complex trauma expert Dr. Gillian O’Shea Brown joins me to explore how Greek myths can help us make sense of complex trauma, CPTSD, and the relational wounds we carry from childhood.

Gillian is SUCH a good storyteller, and she walks us through four myths that might feel a little too familiar.

In this episode, we talk about

Everyone has parts. So how do you know when a part is just a part of you, and when it's crossed into a dissociative disorder like OSDD or DID?

This episode came from a listener healing from CPTSD who just found out she has a dissociative disorder. She asked two questions a lot of trauma survivors are carrying. How common are dissociative disorders in trauma survivors? And with parts work like IFS so popular right now, where's the line between ordinary parts and dissociation?

So we're walking the whole dissociative spectrum, from the drive home...

Why can you feel lonely and then want everyone to leave you alone, or set a boundary and immediately want to take it back? Today, I explore why conflicting parts and contradictory responses can feel especially intense after complex trauma, drawing from parts work, attachment research, fear learning, and Somatic Experiencing.

You’ll hear why missing someone doesn’t mean the relationship was safe, why guilt doesn’t prove a boundary was wrong, and how the body can move toward something while also putting on the brakes. The goal isn’t to decide which response is the “real you,”...

How do you grieve a childhood you never had? If you grew up with childhood emotional neglect, you may have heard that grief is part of complex trauma recovery and still have no idea what you're supposed to be grieving, or what that grief is supposed to feel like.

This episode is built around a listener's question. She grew up without much affection, remembers wanting it, and came to believe that needing it meant she wasn't growing up properly. Decades later, she's wondering whether she has anything to grieve, and whether feeling sad about it is selfish.<...

What happens when you grow up learning that someone else’s needs, emotions, or version of reality matter more than your own?

In this episode, I’m joined by Amy Marlow-MaCoy, MEd, LPC, to talk about narcissistic abuse and its relationship to complex trauma. We unpack narcissistic family systems, gaslighting and DARVO, the roles children can take on in these families, and why survivors may struggle with self-trust, perfectionism, overfunctioning, guilt, and boundaries long after childhood.

We also talk about what happens when you begin changing these patterns, the complexity of low and no contact, and...

You’re functioning. You may even be the person everyone relies on. But inside, you feel stuck, distant, or like you aren’t fully there for your own life.

In this episode, I'm answering a listener’s question: Is functional freeze actually real, or is it something the internet picked up and oversimplified?

We explore what trauma clinicians mean by functional freeze, why it isn’t a formal diagnosis, and how mixed patterns of activation and shutdown can make you look capable while everything inside feels stalled. I also explain why functional freeze and dissociation aren’t i...

You finally understand something about yourself. Something that took months of therapy to even name. And now you need someone else to get it too.

This week we're talking about that longing, where it comes from, why it can feel so urgent with certain people, and what happens in your body when the conversation doesn't go the way you hoped. We'll cover emotional flashbacks, the fight flight freeze fawn response, and the difference between being understood and being agreed with. Plus, what's actually yours to hold onto when someone doesn't meet you where you're at.

...

Why can you handle a crisis without blinking but completely blank when someone asks what you want for dinner?

Brain fog, forgetfulness, trouble focusing, difficulty starting tasks, and executive dysfunction can all show up alongside complex trauma. But “trauma changed your brain” is a much more complicated story than the internet often makes it sound.

In this episode of The Complex Trauma Podcast, we’re breaking down what may actually be happening when your brain feels scattered, slow, forgetful, or wildly inconsistent.

Instead of another tour of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, we’re looki...

Maybe you barely remember your childhood. Maybe you've done years of trauma work, you're finally feeling better, and now you're wondering, was it really that bad? Did I make it all up?

This episode is about trauma, memory, and self-trust. 

Why memory isn't a recording, why gaps and fragments don't prove or disprove anything, why healing itself can create distance from a memory, and why I don't remember doesn't have to become I can't trust myself.

You don't have to make yourself hurt again to prove that you once hurt 🧡.

This week's episode is  a little different. Instead of something super polished, I'm giving you the real time version of my own messy middle. What dysregulation actually feels like in my body right now, why regulation isn't the absence of activation, and what's actually helping me stay steady in a hard season of my life, from a walk around the block to finally asking for help.

If you're a complex trauma survivor in your own hard season, this one's for you. It's okay to lower a standard, ask for the help, and let the tears come if t...

Why does connection feel so hard after complex trauma?

You want closeness, but when someone gets too close, you pull away.

You want support, but "I'm fine" comes out before you've even thought about it.

You want to trust people, yet asking for help, receiving kindness, or staying present during conflict can feel surprisingly difficult.

If you've ever wondered why relationships feel so complicated after childhood trauma or emotional neglect, this episode is for you.

Today, we're exploring how your earliest relationships taught your nervous system what...

What is the real impact of growing up with emotionally immature parents? Dr. Lindsay Gibson, author of the bestselling Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, joins the show to explain what it costs a child over decades, and how to parent differently.

In this conversation, we get into:

If you've ever caught yourself wondering who you actually are underneath the anxiety, the people pleasing, or the version of you that shows up to keep everyone else comfortable, this episode is for you.

I break down what a sense of self actually is, why complex trauma gets in the way of building one, and what it looks like to start forming it now, as an adult. That means looking at three capacities trauma tends to disrupt: knowing yourself, expressing yourself, and experiencing yourself, and a few grounded, body-based ways to start reconnecting with each one.

Sometimes a hobby amplifies whatever relationship your nervous system has with uncertainty.

If you've ever found yourself staring at a blank page, putting off a creative project, or feeling tense doing something that's supposed to be relaxing, this episode is for you.

Today we're exploring why perfectionism can turn creativity into a performance, how complex trauma changes our relationship with uncertainty, and why your hobbies may feel more like a test than a source of joy.

We'll talk about the connection between self-worth and perfectionism, predictive processing, why healing in relationships doesn't always...

If you've ever wondered why insight alone hasn't been enough to heal your trauma, this episode is your answer. We're going all the way back to fundamentals with a real somatic therapy 101, covering what somatic therapy actually is, how the nervous system holds onto trauma, and why healing from CPTSD requires more than just understanding your story.

In this episode, we cover:

Ever been called controlling? Too rigid? Too much? On today's episode I breaks down why it was maybe never about control. Your nervous system has maybe been trying to answer one question this whole time: am I safe?

This episode covers the real reason behind reassurance seeking, perfectionism, hypervigilance, overthinking, and food rules, and why none of it is a character flaw. Using research on predictive processing and a concept called precision weighting from EMDR therapist Thomas Zimmerman, Sarah explains why your brain keeps choosing the old danger prediction even when you're safe right now. And why...

Emotional flashbacks are one of the most common and most misunderstood experiences in complex trauma. Unlike visual flashbacks, they don't come with images or a clear memory. They arrive as intense feelings, shame, fear, loneliness, helplessness, often with no story attached and no warning.

In this episode, Sarah breaks down what emotional flashbacks actually are. You'll learn why insight alone doesn't change the nervous system's predictions, what's happening in your body when each survival part gets activated, and what healing actually requires at the level of the body.

In this episode:

Do you feel guilty every time you need something, even from people who love you? Do you find it easy to show up for everyone else but nearly impossible to let someone show up for you?

If so, this episode is for you.

In episode 135, I explore the belief that you are a burden. Not as a passing thought, but as a felt sense in the body that gets activated the moment you need something from another person.

I break down where this pattern might come from developmentally, how it shows up differently...

Many complex trauma survivors struggle to trust their memories, emotions, perceptions, and reactions. 

In this episode, we're exploring why being disbelieved can feel so painful, how emotional neglect and attachment wounds can teach us to question ourselves, and why trauma often leaves us with fragments of memory instead of a clear narrative.

We discuss:

 • Why not being believed can feel abandoning
 • How self-doubt becomes a survival strategy
 • Trauma memory and fragmentation
 • Why emotional neglect can be difficult to identify
 • The connection between CPTSD, self-trust, and attachment
 • How to begin rebuil...

Emotional loneliness is one of the most common and least talked about experiences in complex trauma recovery. It's not about the number of people in your life. It's about whether your nervous system has learned to let them in. And for a lot of survivors, it hasn't. Not because something is permanently wrong with you, but because your nervous system learned some very specific things about connection a long time ago.

In this episode, I break down some of the neuroscience and nervous system mechanics behind emotional loneliness in CPTSD, why it runs so much deeper than...

Sleep is one of the most common struggles in the CPTSD community, and one of the least understood. If you've tried the routines, the supplements, the magnesium, the blue light glasses, and you're still lying awake at midnight or waking up at 3am feeling like something is wrong, this episode is for you.

Today I break down why sleep is uniquely hard when you have complex trauma, what's actually happening in your nervous system at night, and what might actually help. 

In this episode:

Inner child healing isn't easy work. For people living with complex trauma, it can be one of the most neurobiologically specific processes in trauma recovery. And the version most people have been handed doesn't come close to touching it.

In this episode we get into what inner child healing actually is, what the young part is really doing in your nervous system, and what reparenting actually looks like and what might get in the way.

In this episode:

You've done the work. You've been in therapy, read the books, and you can name what happened to you. So why doesn't it feel like enough?

That gap between understanding your story and actually feeling different in your body has a reason. And it's not because you haven't tried hard enough. It's because childhood emotional neglect creates a very specific kind of wound that requires a very specific kind of repair. In this episode we're going past the recognition and getting into what that repair actually looks like and how to start creating it in your real...

If you've been diagnosed with more than one thing, and it feels like every provider is treating each piece in isolation, this episode is for you.

Complex PTSD doesn't just show up as one condition. For many people, CPTSD symptoms include a stack of co-occurring diagnoses that are deeply connected at the nervous system level but rarely treated that way. In this episode, I break down exactly what might be happening underneath seven of the most common conditions that show up alongside complex trauma, and why understanding the connection changes everything about how healing can work.

If you've spent your life being told you're "too nice," "a people-pleaser," or that you just need to "set better boundaries," this episode is for you. 

Fawning is the fourth trauma response, and for most folks with complex PTSD, it's been... a thing... for decades. 

In this episode, Sarah unpacks what fawning actually is (hint: it's not a personality flaw), how it gets built in childhood, what it can feel like in the body, and three small experiments to begin the work of coming home to yourself.

This is one of the most re...

If you've ever sat in your therapist's office and thought "I sort of just want you to take care of me" and then felt embarrassed for even thinking it, this episode is for you.

Listener Laurie wrote in after the "I Finally Stopped Shrinking" episode asking why being truly seen by a therapist can feel so activating, why grounding doesn't always hit the way her therapist intends it to, and why part of her just wants her therapist to show up more parentally even though she knows that's not the answer.

We took her question...

If you've ever wondered why the harshest voice in your head won't quiet down, this episode might help you reframe the why's behind it.

This week I sits down with Emily Pagone, LCPC, founder of Authentic Growth Wellness Group and host of The Inner Critic Podcast. Emily specializes in IFS therapy, EMDR, and somatic approaches with a particular focus on complex trauma and neurodivergent trauma recovery.

We talk about what the inner critic actually is through an IFS lens, why it developed, and why trying to silence it usually backfires. We get honest about our...

You did the work. You stopped shrinking. You let someone in. And it still ended with you feeling invisible.

So what do you do with that?

In this episode I'm responding to a message from a listener going through a divorce. She didn't shrink. She showed up fully. And it still ended in abandonment.

 Her question was simple and devastating: how do you reconcile that? And, how do you ever trust again?

On today's episode I get into why adult relationships can reopen old wounds rather than heal them, what your n...

In today's episode, I'm sitting down with Libby Ward, creator, speaker, and author of Honest Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself, to talk about what it really looks like to wake up mid-motherhood and realize you never actually knew yourself to begin with. Not because motherhood took you away from yourself, but because trauma did that long before your kids ever showed up.

We talk about the overfunctioning, the perfectionism, the hypervigilance disgused up as "being a good mom," and the moment Libby hit a wall in her car on an ordinary morning that changed...

You might not call it shame. But if you were emotionally neglected, there's a chance it's been running the show.

Most people who grew up emotionally neglected don't have a name for what they carry. They just know that asking for help feels wrong, that they can't stop replaying conversations, that being seen makes them want to disappear.

This episode is about why that story forms, where it lives in the body, and why it's so hard to recognize as shame at all.

I break down the difference between shame from overt trauma...

Sex and complex trauma. It's one of those topics that doesn't get nearly enough airtime, and yet it comes up so frequently in the therapy room.

In this episode I'm talking with Rachael Garner, a certified sex therapist and EMDR clinician who works with complex trauma survivors, about what actually happens to our relationship with sex, desire, and our bodies when we've experienced complex trauma. And there is a lot more nuance here than most people realize.

We talk about why dissociation during sex happens and what your body is doing when it checks out...

If you've ever gone completely blank in the middle of a hard conversation, or found yourself frozen, heart hammering, unable to say a single thing, this episode is for you.

A listener wrote in asking why she shuts down instead of getting upset. Why everyone else seems to cry or fight while she just goes numb and feels nothing. And whether something is wrong with her.

The answer is no. And this whole episode is the explanation.

We cover the difference between freeze and shutdown, because they get used interchangeably and they are...

If you've done the work, learned the tools, and still feel like you're white knuckling through every single day, this episode is for you.

For many people with complex PTSD and developmental trauma, calm isn't somewhere familiar to return to. It's something that has to be built, maybe for the first time. And that changes everything about how healing needs to look.

This episode breaks down three concepts from developmental trauma research that explain why nervous system regulation can feel so darn hard, and why that has nothing to do with how hard you're trying.<...

Childhood emotional neglect doesn't always look like what you'd expect. Sometimes it looks like a parent who showed up to every game, made dinner every night, and still wasn't really there. That gap between what was present and what was missing is exactly what we're unpacking today.

Dr. Danica Harris is a somatic experiencing practitioner and complex trauma expert, and she breaks down why emotional neglect is so hard to identify, what it costs the body to grow up as the easy kid, and what healing actually looks like when you go low and slow. If you've...

After my conversation with Janina Fisher about dissociative parts, my inbox exploded with questions about dissociation. So today, I'm answering three that showed up a few times

In this episode, we're covering:

If you've ever driven home from therapy wondering why your brain keeps checking out, or if you've told your story...

Betrayal doesn't just hurt. 

It rewires your nervous system, shakes your ability to trust yourself, and makes you question everything you thought you knew about your relationship. 

In this episode, Joe Sanok shares what happened when his marriage ended suddenly on an RV trip, how he navigated the shock of becoming an unexpected single dad, and what it actually took to rebuild his life without replaying the same patterns.

Joe talks openly about waking up in a camper next to someone who was already gone, the nervous system chaos that followed, and why he...

What if forgetting your childhood, feeling disconnected from your emotions, or experiencing different "versions" of yourself weren't signs that something's wrong with you, but evidence of how brilliantly your brain protected you?

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Janina Fisher, one of the leading experts on trauma and dissociation, to unpack what dissociation actually is and why it's a survival response, not a pathology. We talk about why so many people say "I had a good childhood" even when they can barely remember it, what's really happening when you lose time or feel like different...

This episode is a bit different. If it's not for you, that's okay.

Right now, a lot of us are struggling. The anxiety that won't quit, the rage that scares you, the numbness that makes you wonder what's wrong with you, the exhaustion that feels bone-deep. You're not overreacting. Your nervous system is responding to real threat.

In this episode, we talk about what happens in your body when threat is ongoing and there's no clear way to resolve it. We look at vicarious trauma, suppressed anger, grief that doesn't feel like sadness, and the...

In this episode, I sit down with Cassidy DuHadway, author of "Becoming Me," to talk about religious trauma as complex trauma. We dig into how growing up in systems that demand you not be yourself creates deep attachment wounds, shame spirals, and an outsourcing of your internal knowing.

Cassidy breaks down what religious trauma actually is, how it shows up in adult relationships, and why leaving or deconstructing your faith creates such profound grief and identity loss. We talk about the cost of purity culture, the weight of intergenerational patterns, and what it takes to rebuild when...