Do I Have Trauma? Signs & Advice From a C-PTSD Survivor

I typed “Am I traumatized?” into Google, though I was pretty sure I wasn’t. I got my diagnosis just a few months later.

When people ask me what it was like to finally get a trauma diagnosis, my answer is usually the same: “It was shocking.”

I think most people expect that I would have felt relief, but the truth is, it took a long time for me to recognize that I was actually traumatized, and that much of what I had experienced was, in fact, emotional abuse.

What often surprises people the most is that I’d been in therapy for about five years before a clinician finally realized I had significant trauma in my history.

Instead, I had been given every misdiagnosis you can imagine — from bipolar disorder to borderline personality disorder to generalized anxiety — because I kept self-reporting that I was depressed, anxious, and at times, seemingly out of control.

Still, I remained a locked vault, both to my therapists and to myself, about the past suffering I’d endured that had brought me to their office.

What little I shared about my past, I spoke with such an eerie calmness and detachment, my first therapist didn’t register that the lack of visible distress did not mean that I was actually okay.

In other words, like many complex trauma survivors especially, I initially slipped through the cracks.

My experience (and others like mine) reveals a serious misunderstanding about what it means to be traumatized: That, if you were traumatized, you’d definitely know it — and if all else failed, you would be diagnosed right away. Neither were true for me.

In actuality, you might not know you’re traumatized, and others might not recognize the signs, especially if trauma is not an area of specialty for them!

That said, with the right support, you can receive the answers, care, and healing that you deserve.

How Do You Know If You Have Trauma?

Trauma typically refers to an event or ongoing context (like an abusive relationship or childhood neglect) which is emotionally disturbing and may be perceived as life-threatening to the person experiencing it.

What’s traumatizing for one individual may not be experienced as such to another, but generally speaking, trauma almost always evokes a profound sense of helplessness and lack of safety, which may persist without adequate support.

When trauma has long lasting impacts on one’s well-being, this is what’s known as post-traumatic stress.

When people imagine PTSD and C-PTSD, though, they’re often still relying on a very narrow stereotype about what trauma “looks” like.

They think of the veteran who returns from war, and loses touch with reality when a loud sound happens nearby, or when someone sneaks up from behind them.

And this isn’t to invalidate that experience, at all.

For some, PTSD will be exactly like that — a strong reaction to a more obvious trigger that is reminiscent of a specific event or traumatic experience.

But for others, especially those of us who experience complex trauma (meaning our trauma happened over a long period of time, usually in the context of a relationship, like abuse or neglect), our trauma responses can actually be a little more subtle.

To give you an idea of the subtlety I’m talking about, I’ll share a (low stakes) example from my own life!

What does trauma feel like?

Just this week, I was finishing up in the bathroom when I heard the faint sound of my cat, Andy, messing with a glass of water I’d (foolishly) left on my desk.

I knew it was right next to my work computer, but because I was still washing my hands, I felt helpless to stop him from knocking it over.

I panicked and called for my partner. “Help! Please help!” was all I could manage to shout. They didn’t hear me, however.

When I finally managed to sprint out of the bathroom, I was in a complete panic. I began loudly scolding my cat and frantically pacing the room, which got my partner’s attention. By the time they came over to see what was wrong, I was boiling over with rage.

“It’s the f-ing water, and the f-ing laptop!” I yelled, and taken aback by my own anger, I abruptly rushed out of the room.

On its surface, you might be thinking, “That doesn’t sound like trauma. It sounds like you overreacted to an annoying situation.” I would’ve said the same thing years ago.

But now that I’m aware of my triggers and I’m able to slow down (thanks, therapy!), I can see where trauma hides beneath moments like these.

Let’s backtrack a little, then.

What are emotional flashbacks?

I know now that my C-PTSD is often very present in escalated moments like these.

I can recognize now that because of my past experiences of emotional neglect — when I didn’t have adults I could depend on when I felt unsafe — calling out for help and not getting a response can be very triggering for me.

So when my partner didn’t respond and the situation worsened, our interaction was no longer really about the glass of water or my laptop awaiting its fate.

I experienced what’s called an emotional flashback — sometimes described as “amygdala hijackings” — where survivors, when triggered, will regress back to the fear, despair, and rage they felt under traumatic circumstances.

This is often followed by intense shame for experiencing such a seemingly “irrational” reaction.

Being unable to stop something bad from happening (especially something I could “get in trouble for,” i.e. damaging work property), and not receiving support when I called out for help, was enough to trigger those old feelings of being trapped, afraid, ignored, and enraged.

When I then started yelling and swearing, I was viscerally reminded of how my parents behaved toward me when they were angry. I became scared of how much I sounded like them, sending me into a deeper shame spiral. That’s when I fled the room.

If you’re already familiar with things like fight, flight, and freeze, this will probably make some sense to you already (I essentially had a fight response when I was triggered by perceived neglect from my partner, and when I was reminded of the verbal abuse I experienced as a child, I then had a flight response).

If this had happened to me years prior, however, I would have described it very differently.

“I don’t know,” I probably would have said. “My cat knocked over some water and I freaked out.”

Do I have trauma or am I overreacting?

Years ago, whenever I was triggered, I simply concluded that I was a broken, sensitive, dramatic, and even unhinged person that made “mountains out of molehills.”

But after working with a trauma-informed therapist (and undergoing something called the Safe and Sound Protocol, a nervous system intervention), not only am I triggered far less often, but I’m also able to quickly recover when it happens.

After leaving the room, I took some deep breaths, recognized what triggered me, and soothed that part of me. I could feel genuine tenderness, compassion, and care toward the younger part of me that surfaced in that moment, without shaming myself for the reaction I had.

(And? My laptop was totally fine, thanks to a stack of napkins that I happened to have left there from lunch, which managed to catch most of the water.)

I apologized to my partner for raising my voice and leaving them with the mess, gave my cat a reassuring snuggle, and we moved on with our day.

If you’ve spent many years tamping down on or even disconnecting from your past, though, it’s not so easy to see the connection between how your past is showing up in the present.

That’s why the best way to figure out if you’re really “traumatized” isn’t a quiz or online test, but rather, speaking with a PTSD therapist who deeply understands how trauma works.

A lot of the time, we learn to adapt to trauma in ways that can be hard to recognize, and many of us even form trauma bonds with the people who harmed us, obscuring the fact that we were ever abused.

What Are the Common Signs or Symptoms of Trauma?

All that said, there are some common experiences that survivors of trauma often share, depending on the type of trauma.

I share these lists not as all-inclusive checklists, but rather, as a starting place for recognizing where you may be struggling.

Signs of Acute PTSD

For post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which refers specifically to post-traumatic stress that develops after an acute event (like witnessing a natural disaster or experiencing an assault), the symptoms a clinician would be looking for will have been ongoing for a month or more.

Signs of Complex PTSD

For complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) — which refers to post-traumatic stress that results from ongoing trauma (like an abusive or neglectful upbringing, domestic violence, trafficking, incarceration or hospitalization, or any prolonged lack of safety) — you’ll see many of the same symptoms as acute PTSD, in addition to a few more specific ones.

It’s crucial to remember that oftentimes, when we leave an abusive or unsafe situation, these “symptoms” can actually worsen. Many survivors will attribute this to just “being crazy” and that, if it were trauma, things should have improved when they left the abusive environment.

However, many of us will react to safe environments with a sense of deep unease, hypervigilance, impulsivity, depression, and more — sometimes a safe environment is what allows us to finally fall apart!

If your mental health worsened or changed instead of improving after the immediate abuse or trauma, this is often exactly what we mean when we say someone is traumatized.

What if I don’t remember the trauma?

This is more common than people often realize!

Some people may experience different kinds of dissociation during and after trauma, where they disconnect from their bodies, their emotions, and even their sense of reality.

While we may not have clear memories of certain events or even periods of time, our bodies often hold that trauma for us.

Having a movie of specific events replaying in your head or being able to recall specific phrases someone said are just one type of remembering, but there are other ways the past can be recalled and felt.

If you’d like more information on different types of trauma responses, this resource unpacks many of the most common responses to triggers that survivors may experience. Dissociation is often described as a freeze response, or even a collapse or “flop” response.

Do I Need Trauma Therapy?

A major barrier for survivors accessing trauma therapy is simply recognizing that it’s needed.

One of the common reasons why survivors don’t always register a need for therapy is because some of us can appear quite “functional” on the surface.

To compensate for the sense that we’re “bad” (or otherwise to blame for what happened to us), many of us become singularly focused on being “good” — the good eldest child, the good student, the good employee — often to the detriment of our own well-being.

For some of us, this looks like being caught in cycles of relentless drive and total paralysis or burnout (some might call those “flight” and “fawn,” and then “freeze,” respectively).

But not all of us experience this drive. Some of us become so convinced that we’re broken or bad beyond repair, we essentially collapse.

This can look like relying on numbing behaviors and self-harm to essentially “check out” from our lives — and then we blame our “bad choices” for how our lives are going (“I’m just a lazy stoner,” “I’m just not driven like my brother is”), without realizing that those choices are helping us survive, even if they make us miserable just the same.

You might even relate to both of those descriptions. As someone who has been, in different seasons of my life, the workaholic and the so-called “lazy” stoner, I can assure you that they’re not as separate as you might think.

The truth is, trauma can look a lot of different ways — and the only way you’ll know for sure if you could benefit from trauma therapy is to actually try it.

How to feel safe after trauma

We can learn a lot about safety after trauma by looking at other animals, actually.

For example: When I was dog sitting a very sweet Labrador puppy, my elderly cat often found his high energy and constant demands to play extremely annoying, to say the least.

One afternoon, after ignoring a warning hiss (he hadn't learned yet what that hiss meant!), my cat swiped this pup’s face — drawing a little blood on his snout. Taken aback by the confusing betrayal, the pup began to whimper, barreling toward me for comfort.

After soothing him and ensuring his wound was superficial, I watched him shake off the stress and carry on playing. While he had some understandable apprehension around my cat for a while, our connection and consistent support allowed him to rebound after the shock.

So why am I sharing a story about a puppy who was swatted by a cat?

It’s a good example of what would ideally happen when we’re made to feel unsafe.

In short, we would retreat from the threat, experience safe connection and reassurance, and gradually rebuild our trust in similar situations.

But let's say we weren’t able to retreat. Or maybe we didn’t experience the kind of safe connection afterward (and were, instead, alone or neglected in the aftermath), or experienced repeated events that wore down our sense of safety and trust in ourselves and/or others.

That healing process would be, understandably, a little more complex!

As someone who has rescued animals, I’ve seen this with some of my companions, too. There’s a longer term process of fostering trust, helping the body reestablish a sense of security, and creating an environment where, slowly but surely, the impending sense of danger can be honored and released.

Human beings aren’t shelter animals, of course — our healing process will also involve some unlearning of beliefs we hold about ourselves as a result of what happened to us — but it’s a helpful reminder that while trauma may have disrupted our sense of safety, there are ways to recover and reconnect.

Trauma-informed therapies, and nervous system interventions (like the Safe and Sound Protocol), are just a few ways of rediscovering safety and connection after trauma.

From one survivor to another: You aren’t broken.

Part of what took me so long to recognize that I’d been traumatized is that it was easier to believe that there was something wrong with me — that I was inherently deficient, broken, or crazy — than to really grapple with the reality that someone I trusted had profoundly harmed me.

This is common for survivors, especially survivors of emotional abuse as children.

It’s often “easier” to blame ourselves, which at least gives us some sense of hope or control — that, if we just do what we’re told, don’t fight back, and are “good” and “well-behaved,” the abuse will stop.

And for trauma survivors of all sorts, we experienced a level of powerlessness that has stayed with us — and we did the best that we could to cope with that.

Many of us created an alternative story, then, where we actually deserved what happened to us — where, within that story, if we had done all the “right things,” we might be safe.

Because when it’s our fault, we don’t have to fully confront what our wounds reveal about our parents, our partners, our friends, our pastors, our mentors, our neighbors.

If it’s our fault, there’s still something we can do, in theory. But if it weren’t, it could shatter everything we thought we knew about our homes, our communities, even our world.

We carry those survival stories with us, whether we fully realize it or not.

It’s why, when I was misdiagnosed as having bipolar disorder, I didn’t initially question it — I was crazy, after all. And when the medications weren’t working, I figured it must have been because I was too “broken” to be fixed.

It’s why I spent most of my young adulthood chasing the validation and love of people who, instead, dangled it like a carrot over my head to see just how hard I’d run. I just wasn’t running fast enough, I guess. (Sound familiar? Should I just @ you next time?)

We aren’t broken or bad and deficient, though. We never were.

The only thing that’s “broken” is the trust and sense of safety we entered this world with — where we simply knew that if we cried, someone would tend to us.

Safety is our birthright (we were essentially wired for it!), even in a world that so often fails to protect us and may even target us because of who we are.

With safe relationships and attuned support, though, that sense of trust can be rebuilt little by little, even if it’s just within our chosen families and communities.

And in case no one has told you yet, you deserve exactly that — to find healing connections that foster a deep sense of safety, trust, and yes, even joy.