Ask A Therapist: What does healing from trauma look like - With Dr. Ruth Gatt
Let’s talk about healing from complex trauma, relational wounds, and emotionally misattuned parenting.
Complex trauma is highly relational in nature. Relational trauma refers to mistreatment by another person, and for those living with complex trauma, this often means chronic misattunement, abuse, or neglect by emotionally immature, misattuned, or narcissistic caregivers. Many children living through this near-constant traumatization develop complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD).
So, what does healing from C-PTSD, or complex trauma, look like?
Because complex trauma is relational, so is my therapeutic approach. That means that I value the relationship I create with you. I lean into your feelings, your pain, and your shame, and help you to navigate your way toward self-compassion. In this deep-diving journey, I have found these things to be irreplaceable:
1. Establishing a sense of reality and safety
This is especially true for survivors whose trauma included narcissistic abuse, manipulation, or gaslighting. If this is you, your sense of reality has likely been chipped away at for a long time. We need to find solid footing before diving deeper, so that we can help your body feel safe. If this is foreign to you, you’re not alone. That’s why we start here. We get to know your nervous system, your triggers, your beliefs about yourself and the world, and all the moments that led us here.
This is also especially true for survivors whose trauma involved chronically feeling unimportant, uninteresting, “bad,” or flawed in some vital way. This can be devastating to a person’s sense of self. If the original wounds happened in childhood, then rebuilding reality starts by untangling family dynamics and discovering unhealed childhood wounds.
2. Grief work
In the first stage, we’ve kicked up a lot of dust. We’ve learned a lot about your family, your relationships, your nervous system, and some of the reasons why you’ve been carrying this pain for so long.
There is space for your grief here.
And I can promise you a few things: You won’t be alone in your grief. Grieving is NOT “wallowing,” and grieving does not make you ungrateful or “bad.” And of course. You deserve a safe space to feel this. Being denied a safe space to grieve and feel held and validated is part of what causes the trauma.
For survivors of CPTSD and complex trauma, grief work is essential to healing. Treating Complex PTSD, therefore, naturally involves diving deep into your past, accessing buried wounds, and learning to grieve.
3. Getting to know your 4F Trauma Response
What’s your 4F Type? These include Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn, and sometimes a combination. Learning and working with your trauma type gives us a solid framework for understanding your triggers, responses, and unmet needs. Your specific trauma type says a lot about how you learned to survive. We need to tap into this so we can learn how best to support your healing 🌷.
4. Reparenting
Healing from complex trauma does NOT mean trying to obey emotionally immature or abusive parents or caregivers who sent messages like,
“Just get over it”
“Why are you so dramatic?”
“You have nothing to complain about”
“Why do you have to be so difficult”
Etc. etc. etc.
NO. Your early childhood needs were the same as what every child needs—to feel valued and cared for. To be protected. To know that all of you is accepted. Those needs don’t just float away. Reparenting is a process by which we work to reach your inner child and attend to their needs with patience and compassion.
5. Connecting with Self-Compassion & Quieting the Critic
There’s that word again😊. Connecting with self-compassion can be difficult when it’s been snuffed out or redirected toward caregivers. As we progress through the stages of healing, we nurture your self-compassion, which also involves quieting that internalized critic that wants to send all the shaming and disempowering messages to keep you stuck. (fun fact: this inner critic is usually an internalized parent or caregiver voice, and not part of you).
This also involves a lot of work around boundaries, since emotionally immature or abusive caregivers or partners probably did not support you in advocating for your own needs. This is where you take your power back, or perhaps discover it for the first time.💛
Interested in working with Ruth? Book a free 30-minute consultation with our therapist matchmaker and we will see if Dr. Ruth is the best fit for you! She offers EMDR Therapy, Brainspotting Therapy, and Individual Therapy. Consultations are a great way to get to know our practice, policies, and see if we have a therapist on staff who would be a good therapeutic match. Consultations for therapy are for California residents only.
These blogs talk more about the basics of EMDR:
You can read more about Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy here: