The book, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker, is a compassionate, practical guide for understanding and healing childhood trauma, CPTSD, and complex trauma. Walker explains how chronic abuse or neglect in childhood wires the nervous system for danger, leading to symptoms like emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, harsh inner critic attacks, and difficulty with boundaries.
CPTSD vs PTSD: Understanding the Difference Matters for Healing
When most people think of PTSD, they think of war veterans, of being attacked or injured by an enemy fighter. But with CPTSD, the war zone was your home. The people attacking you were your family members. Perhaps you were criticized, insulted, beaten, abused, or neglected. Maybe you had to walk on eggshells, being constantly vigilant because you never knew what mood your unpredictable parent would be in. Sometimes they might shower you with love; other times they’d explode, punishing you for speaking up, for just having a need or an emotion.
This is the reality for many people with Complex PTSD (CPTSD). CPTSD is what happens when a person grows up in an unsafe emotional environment for so long that their body and mind get stuck in survival mode. Instead of one big traumatic event, it’s the result of many wounds over time. You develop these reflexive responses that you carry into adulthood and don’t even realize you’re doing: self-sabotage, avoiding intimacy, people pleasing, or lashing out in anger. People with CPTSD often struggle with self-worth, anxiety, trust, and big emotional reactions that seem to come out of nowhere—but all of it makes sense when you understand it as the after-effect of childhood trauma.
Pete Walker is a therapist who wrote Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, he lived through and is in the process of healing from his own childhood trauma. In his book, Pete explains the emotional and psychological wounds that come from growing up in an abusive or neglectful environment—and more importantly, how to heal from them.
This is a really helpful book and I recommend it for anyone who struggles with childhood trauma, as well as therapists and other support people. Let’s unpack the book together, we’re going to talk about what is Complex PTSD, and how it shows up in your daily life, the four F trauma responses, emotional flashbacks, how a critical parent gets turned into your inner critic, toxic shame, grieving your childhood, and reparenting. And of course we’ll look at some really practical options for how to work through these symptoms. So, let’s jump in.
What is Complex Trauma?
Unlike traditional PTSD, which usually results from a single traumatic incident (like a car crash or assault), Complex PTSD comes from repeated emotional injuries, often in childhood. It usually happens when kids grow up in environments where their emotional needs aren’t met—where love was conditional, neglect was normalized, and shame was used as a tool of control.
This chronic exposure to abuse, fear, criticism, or abandonment can leave deep scars.
Pete writes that C-PTSD symptoms can include:
- Emotional flashbacks
- Toxic shame
- A harsh inner critic
- Social anxiety
- Abandonment depression
- People-pleasing
- People-avoidance
- Difficulty trusting others
And we’ll go into detail on these later in the video. These symptoms, which are different from regular PTSD, are often misdiagnosed as depression, anxiety, borderline personality, or even ADHD. But when seen through the lens of trauma, they begin to make sense. All of these behaviors are protective behaviors that make perfect sense in an abusive environment, but they just aren’t very helpful or adaptive in a healthier environment.
- If your parents aren’t safe for you to open up to, or you would fight without ever resolving things, then it makes sense to withdraw to your room as a child. But now, as an adult, you vacillate between desperately clinging to a partner and abruptly calling things off (avoidance).
- If your parents judged you harshly, it makes sense to expect that friends might judge you harshly as well. So you take protective measures in social situations like carefully monitoring what you say and do (social anxiety, mistrust).
- If being super compliant and accommodating kept your parents from hurting you, it makes sense that you developed a habit of appeasing (people pleasing).
How Childhood Trauma Impacts the Brain
Now that we know what Complex PTSD looks like, let’s talk about how it affects a child’s developing brain, because when the brain is chronically exposed to relational stress or trauma, especially during early development, this can lead to long-term changes in brain structure and function. Key brain regions involved in survival, emotion regulation, and memory become dysregulated:
- The amygdala (threat detection center) becomes overactive, making the person hypervigilant and prone to emotional flashbacks, and anxiety, panic attacks, taking things personally, etc.
- The prefrontal cortex (reasoning and regulation) becomes underactive during stress, reducing the ability to calm oneself or think clearly in triggering situations.
- The hippocampus (memory integration) may shrink or function poorly, impairing the brain’s ability to differentiate between past and present. This makes old emotional memories feel like current threats.
- The nervous system becomes stuck in a persistent fight, flight, freeze, or fawn state, making safety and connection feel unfamiliar or even dangerous. More on this next.
C-PTSD is essentially the brain’s adaptation to prolonged emotional danger. These changes are survival strategies, not defects—and with time, therapy, and regulation, the brain can rewire itself toward safety, connection, and healing. Brain scans show that when we change how we respond to situations, when we learn new ways to think, or when we face our fears or change how we act, our brains physically rewire themselves. I know it can feel like nothing will ever change, that you’re stuck in these unhealthy patterns forever, but I’ve seen it over and over, when you learn new ways to respond, you can heal these patterns little by little. OK, back to the nervous system.
How Complex Trauma Shapes the Four F Trauma Responses
Pete Walker highlights the 4 “F” responses to trauma: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn. In children who are repeatedly traumatized, these responses become survival strategies for coping with overwhelming environments. Over time, the default reaction can become dominant and it begins to infiltrate every area of our life.
Fight
People in fight mode might become angry, defensive, bitter, or controlling. They believe that if they are strong or dominant enough, they can protect themselves from being hurt again. They can’t show weakness or vulnerability because that just leads to being hurt more, so they keep their walls up.
Again, this is a pretty adaptive response. For example, if your older brother keeps beating on you, if you can build up your ability to fight him off, or beat him, you might keep yourself safe. Or if you can overpower your parents, you can protect yourself from their abuses. If you respond to their put-downs with internal anger, then you can protect yourself from believing their insults. There are good times to fight. The problem with CPTSD is that people become kinda rigid with how they respond to every upsetting situation. They have a knee-jerk fight response when the waitress gets their order wrong or when their boss brings up some feedback or when their husband makes a request. They get stuck in patterns of believing that everyone is attacking them-–because their nervous system is primed to see people as attacking—and then they have a triggered response to fight back without thinking it through.
Flight
When your flight response becomes dominant, you avoid things that feel scary. You might avoid conflict, or constantly worry and plan situations in order to “guarantee” that everything will work out fine. Flight types cope by staying busy. They become workaholics, overachievers, or anxious doers. Their unconscious belief is, “If I keep running, nothing will catch me.” In relationships, they might be slow to share their feelings and quick to withdraw at the slightest sign of difficulty.
This is the kid who was constantly monitoring their parent’s mood, and left the room at the slightest sign of a bad mood. They escaped into books, TV, the woods, or into food, friends, or drugs, anything to escape the pain and fear they felt at home. Again, functional as a kid, but as an adult this looks like broken relationships, addiction, and loneliness.
Freeze
The freeze response is about shutting down. These folks might seem dissociated, isolated, or numb. They withdraw into fantasy or avoid relationships to feel safe. They might feel hopeless, helpless, or depressed.
This is the kid who wasn’t allowed to escape their parents’ criticism or beating, they had to stay there, so they just had to take it. To hold still, to go silent. They fantasized about being elsewhere or having power, or they just tried to make their mind go blank. For example, Roahld Dahl attended horrible, abusive boarding schools, and as an adult wrote novels about kids escaping through magical adventures and defeating evil adults.
David Goggins is another good example, as a child he and his mother were violently abused by his father, and he coped by numbing himself out. He used that skill—and I would say perhaps overused that skill—to numb the physical pain of grueling competitions. In 2005 he ran a 100-mile ultramarathon on broken feet and pushing into kidney failure. I find his level of self-discipline to be inspiring, but I also wonder if he has allowed himself to integrate his trauma and learn to feel safe at rest.
Fawn
Fawn types survive by pleasing others. They might become codependent, caretaking, or overly accommodating. Their belief is, “If I’m good enough, they won’t hurt me.” These are the kids who deftly managed threatening parents by praising them, taking care of them, sweet talking them, agreeing with them, and complying with them. But these kids also never felt secure, could never express their own opinions, and lost their ability to speak up for themselves. As adults they often fall into—and stay in—abusive relationships, believing that if they could just be more kind, they could stop the abuser from mistreating them.
Healing Complex Trauma: How to Respond Instead of React
The whole point of understanding your dominant 4 F type can help you gain insight into the behaviors you’re doing without realizing it. When you can see yourself reverting to these behaviors, and you understand what these behaviors are rooted in, you can build some compassion for yourself and start to develop more flexible and adaptive ways of responding to situations.
So for example:
- If you’ve been stuck in a fight response, and you notice that you always get defensive about feedback, you can add on the skill of listening to feedback and pausing without responding.
- If you get stuck in flight and always withdraw when things feel threatening, you can practice staying and facing those difficult encounters. For example, next time there’s a point of conflict in your marriage, instead of shutting down and walking away, you can practice firmly saying “No” and expressing your opinion. Even if it feels like conflict, this might be really essential to staying connected.
- If you get stuck in freeze, you can practice rehearsing action ahead of time. Let’s say you tend to shut down rather than promoting your ideas at work. Instead, you can practice speaking up for your proposal ahead of time Or if you’re a woman who finds that men touch you in unwanted ways, you can take a self-defense class. With freeze, the physical movement is often more helpful than just thinking or talking about change.
- If you get stuck people-pleasing in the fawn response, you could work with a therapist to develop assertive communication, and practice speaking up for yourself, expressing your needs, even if it’s as simple as asking a waiter to replace your food, etc.
When you give yourself new tools to respond to situations, you create a more adaptive and flexible way of being. Just because you may have CPTSD, you don’t have to stay stuck in these survival responses. Your brain is wired to change. It just takes some support and practice.
Emotional Flashbacks in CPTSD: The Invisible Trauma
Usually when people think of flashbacks, they think of a war veteran seeing, hearing and smelling a past event. But according to Pete Walker, flashbacks are different with CPTSD. Unlike vivid sensory memories of traumatic events, emotional flashbacks sneak up without warning. You might suddenly feel small, ashamed, panicked, or hopeless—even if nothing particularly “bad” is happening.
Walker writes that these flashbacks are the result of present-day situations triggering unresolved childhood trauma. For instance, a partner’s annoyed tone might trigger a deep fear of being rejected or punished—even if they’re just having a bad day.
I did a whole video about Pete’s 13 strategies to heal emotional flashbacks. I’ll link that in the description. In a nutshell, the key to healing is recognizing these episodes for what they are: emotional time travel. Your body thinks you’re back in the past. But with awareness, you can learn to
- Name it. “This is an emotional flashback.”
- Ground yourself. Feel your feet, breathe, come back to the present.
- Reassure yourself. “I’m safe now. This feeling will pass.”
- Soothe the inner child. Speak gently to the part of you that was once scared and alone.
This practice helps to rewire your nervous system and build new, safer emotional pathways.
Healing Childhood Trauma: The Inner Critic and Toxic Shame
One of the most damaging effects of complex trauma is toxic shame and the voice of the inner critic.
Walker describes the inner critic as the internalized voice of our abusers—the harsh, judgmental part of us that says things like
- “You’re so stupid.”
- “You’re such a failure.”
- “You’ll never be good enough.”
- “Nobody really likes you.”
This voice often develops in people who grew up with shame as a means to control children. So, “Bobby, why can’t you get that right?!” turns to the first person “I can never do anything right!”. And the result is chronic self-blame, perfectionism, and a deep sense of unworthiness.
To heal, Walker teaches how to build an inner defender—a strong, compassionate voice that can protect your wounded inner child.
This looks like:
- Challenging the inner critic’s lies. Walker even encourages using anger to defend yourself. You might say aloud to yourself, “Don’t talk to me that way!”
- Talking to yourself with kindness. You would say to yourself, “I’m a worthwhile human being,” or, “Everyone makes mistakes.”
- Validating your own feelings. “It’s ok to feel sad sometimes.”
- Repeating affirmations, such as, “I’m not broken. I’m healing.”
You’ll notice how this becomes something of a dialogue. Your inner critic has become a character in your control room, and now you’re interacting with him. And the more you practice challenging him, the weaker the inner critic becomes, and you can start to treat yourself with compassion. And that takes us to reparenting.
Reparenting Yourself After Childhood Trauma: Giving Yourself the Care You Missed
Most people with C-PTSD were not emotionally nurtured. Their caregivers didn’t model love, safety, or emotional attunement. So healing means learning to give yourself what you never got.
This process is called reparenting, and this includes both physical and emotional care:
- Eating when you’re hungry
- Resting when you’re tired
- Speaking to yourself kindly
- Setting boundaries to feel safe
- Creating structure and routines
Reparenting means tending to your emotions. Instead of numbing, ignoring, or shaming your feelings, you learn to sit with them, comfort them, and validate them. You imagine yourself as the gentle, loving parent that you always yearned for, and you treat yourself that way.
One of the practical ways that Pete teaches how to reparent is journaling to connect with your inner child and take care of her. You might write:
“Dear little me, I see how scared and lonely you felt. I’m so sorry no one protected you. But I’m here now, and I won’t abandon you again.”
This kind of self-connection can be deeply healing.
CPTSD and Grief: Mourning the Childhood You Deserved
Many people try to skip the grieving process. It’s like they’re trying to hold their pain at arm’s length, pushing it away. Maybe you’re afraid that it will overwhelm you if you really accept it. But grief, like this brick, is an important part of healing. And, like this brick, it weighs more on us when we’re resisting it.
Ignoring the grief might sound like “My childhood wasn’t that bad”, “Other kids had it worse”, or “I should just move on.”
And we often resist grief by comparing our experience to others, by normalizing it, by trying to skip to the end where we feel forgiveness. You try to hold grief off and portray yourself as okay, all the while carrying this heavy weight around with you.
And I can see why you don’t want to wallow in grief either, it doesn’t help you to allow yourself to be consumed by hatred or self-pity. But that’s not what we’re going for here. It’s about honoring the truth of your experience. Pete Walker describes how healing often requires grieving the loss of a safe childhood, healthy attachment, unconditional love, or protection.
Grieving isn’t wallowing. It’s facing reality. It’s acknowledging how much your trauma has weighed on you. It’s allowing yourself to say:
“That shouldn’t have happened. I deserved better.”
“That hurt me. I felt so lonely and sad.”
And paradoxically, when you allow the grief to move through you, it frees you to let it go and set it down. There’s something about just accepting what you are feeling that helps that feeling move along. You stop carrying it unconsciously in your body, and you make room for peace, joy, and connection.
So please give grief its place in your healing. It’s an important piece to becoming whole.
Healing Complex Trauma by Creating Healthy Boundaries
A huge part of C-PTSD recovery is learning to set and maintain boundaries. Many trauma survivors were never taught they had the right to say no, express preferences, or protect their time and energy.
As you work to heal from trauma, you’re going to find that much of that work happens in relationships. As you start to rebuild a healthier sense of self, you’ll probably find yourself needing to:
- Limit or end contact with toxic people
- Stop justifying or over-explaining
- Say “no” without guilt
- Prioritize safety over obligation
This can be especially hard when it comes to family. But healing means recognizing that biological connection doesn’t equal emotional safety. You have a right to limit contact with anyone who continues to harm you.
At the same time, Pete Walker emphasizes the healing power of safe relationships. C-PTSD is relational trauma, and it heals best in relationship with safe, loving people. I’m making another video on rebuilding healthy attachments after being wounded in childhood, so make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel so that you’ll see it when it comes out. Pete recommends starting with a safe person, like a therapist, someone who is predictable, empathetic, and warm. Then add in support groups where you can be coached through healthy vulnerability with others who are in the healing process. Eventually you can start building trusted friends that can help rewire your sense of trust and belonging.
CPTSD and the Nervous System: Healing Trauma Through the Body
Walker doesn’t just focus on thoughts and beliefs—he acknowledges the role of the nervous system in trauma. When you’ve lived in survival mode for years, your system becomes dysregulated.
You may:
- Startle easily
- Have trouble sleeping
- Feel chronically on edge
- Struggle with digestion
Healing involves calming the body, not just the mind. This might look like:
- Gentle movement
- Vagal tone exercises
- Deep belly breathing
- Body scanning
- Massage or touch therapy
- Spending time in nature
Regulation is a skill that can be rebuilt, and your body can learn that rest is safe.
Daily Practices for Healing Complex PTSD
Healing C-PTSD isn’t about one breakthrough moment. It’s about daily practice. Pete Walker outlines several tools that, when used consistently, create real change:
- Therapy: Especially with trauma-informed, compassionate therapists
- Journaling: Writing to your inner child or processing flashbacks
- Mindfulness & grounding: Noticing the present moment, feeling your feet, breathing deeply
- Inner child work: Imagining, talking to, and comforting your younger self
- Affirmations: Replacing the critic with compassion
- Healthy routines: Sleep, nutrition, movement, play
Each of these practices rewires the nervous system. Slowly but surely, your body begins to believe: I am safe. I am lovable. I belong.
CPTSD Recovery: You Are Not Broken
One of the most hopeful messages in From Surviving to Thriving is this:
You are not broken. You are injured—and injuries can heal.
C-PTSD makes you feel like you’re defective. Like something is wrong with you. But Pete Walker repeatedly emphasizes that you adapted to survive. Your symptoms make sense. You are resilient.
Healing takes time. You may fall into old patterns. But each time you catch a flashback, set a boundary, or soothe your inner child, you are making progress. Recovery is not linear. It’s a spiral that deepens over time.
No matter how wounded you were, you are capable of:
- Feeling joy
- Forming secure relationships
- Trusting your own intuition
- Loving yourself
- Creating a life filled with purpose and peace
Let’s boil it down:
- C-PTSD is a real and painful condition, but it’s not a life sentence.
- Your symptoms are survival responses, not flaws.
- You can learn to soothe your nervous system, reparent yourself, and quiet your inner critic.
- You deserve safety, love, and belonging.
Healing from complex trauma is hard. But it’s also sacred work. It’s the work of reclaiming your story, your voice, your life.
You survived. Now it’s time to thrive.
Thanks so much for being here. You are literally breaking the chains of generational trauma, I hope this is helpful.
For more help regulating your nervous system, my FREE course, Grounding Skills for Anxiety, might be just what you need.
