Articles on Complex Trauma & Mind-Body Healing
Understanding is often where healing begins.
If you’ve spent years managing symptoms that never quite make sense, these articles are a place to start. They explore how complex trauma shapes the nervous system, your relationships, and your body, and what helps it heal.
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Understanding Complex Trauma
Start here if you’re wondering whether what you’ve been carrying might be complex PTSD.
Why Healing From Complex PTSD Is So…Complex
Complex PTSD often grows out of long-term or repeated harm, not one single event. This guide covers common experiences that can lead to it, the signs to look for, and why healing takes a whole-person approach rather than a quick fix.
Read on Substack → · Related: Complex Trauma Therapy →
Complex PTSD Self-Identification Inventory
A reflective checklist of symptoms and patterns commonly linked to complex PTSD, with a free PDF copy. It isn’t a diagnosis, but it can help you put words to what you’ve been living with and bring them to a therapist.
Read on Substack → · Related: Complex Trauma Therapy →
Toxic Shame: What It Really Is — and How You Can Heal
For anyone who has been made to feel too much, not enough, or fundamentally wrong. Learn what toxic shame is, how it lives in the nervous system, and the steps that begin to loosen its hold.
Read on Substack → · Related: Trauma & PTSD Therapy →
Unlearning Survival Stories: Rewriting Your Reality After Trauma
Trauma changes what we believe about ourselves and the world. This piece explores how fear shapes perception, why noticing without judgment is the first step, and conscious and subconscious tools for writing a new story.
THE FOUR F’S SERIES
Fight, Flight, Freeze & Fawn
Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn are the survival strategies a nervous system learns when connection isn’t safe. Start with the overview, then read the response that sounds most like you.
Trauma and the 4 F’s
An introduction to fight, flight, freeze, and fawn as relational survival strategies. It covers healthy versus polarized use of each response, how they connect to attachment, and how recovery expands your choices in connection.
Read on Substack → · Related: Attachment & Relational Therapy →
Anger As Armor: The Narcissistic Fight Response
When anger becomes a shield, it can protect you and push people away at the same time. This piece looks at the fight response, emotional flashbacks, the inner critic, and how nature and nurture shape a fight style.
Read on Substack → · Related: Relationship Issues →
Learning to Stay: Healing the Flight Response in Complex Trauma
A personal look at how workaholism, perfectionism, and constant movement can keep difficult feelings at a distance. It explores securing worth through work, and what it takes to slow down and stay.
Read on Substack → · Related: Panic & Anxiety →
A Body That Was Never Frozen
Freeze is often mistaken for composure. This piece explores what chronic freeze is, how it can organize a whole life, and its connection to autoimmune illness, as activation with nowhere to go.
Read on Substack → · Related: Autoimmune Conditions →
Be Good and Tell The Truth: The Fawn Response and Healing From Trauma-Induced Codependency
Fawning keeps you safe by keeping everyone else happy. Learn how goodness becomes a survival strategy, how it shapes codependency and the sense of self, and how reclaiming healthy anger helps you heal.
Telehealth for NY, FL, MI residents
THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION
Trauma, the Body & Chronic Illness
Long-term stress doesn’t stay in the mind. These articles look at how trauma lives in the nervous system and how it can show up as physical symptoms.
When Survival Becomes A Symptom: The Link Between Complex Trauma and Chronic Illness
How years of emotional survival can reshape the body. It covers the path from complex trauma into illness, why the pattern is more common in women, and why your symptoms are real.
Read on Substack → · Related: Autoimmune Conditions →
When the Body Remembers: How Trauma Lives in Your Nervous System
Symptoms can be messages. This piece explores how trauma disrupts the nervous system’s rhythm, the disconnect between mind and body, and why reconnection is part of the medicine.
Read on Substack → · Related: Somatic Therapy →
Is Your Anxiety A Histamine Issue?
For when talk therapy alone isn’t enough. Learn how histamine and mast cells can feed an anxiety loop, signs your anxiety might be histamine-related, and how trauma can sensitize the whole system.
MEET YOUR THERAPIST
Lisa Kent, LCSW
CCTP-II · EMDR-C
My approach is integrative. Rather than relying on a single method, I draw on EMDR, somatic therapy, IFS, attachment-focused work, MB-CBT, CPT, positive and energy psychology to fit what you need. These articles are a window into how I think about healing: as a whole-system process that attends to your mind, your body, your relationships, and your sense of meaning.
RELATIONSHIPS & MEANING
Relationships, Meaning & Purpose
Healing reaches past symptoms, into how you love, what you believe, and how you spend your days.
Wired for Survival, Longing for Love: Trauma’s Impact on Relationships
Why trauma patterns can sabotage the closeness you want most. It explores self-abandonment, the nervous system in relationship, how to find safe people, and how to become one yourself.
Read on Substack → · Related: Relationship Issues →
Losing Faith After Trauma: Why It Happens — and How to Heal
Trauma can feel like an existential betrayal. This piece looks at how hypervigilance blocks a sense of the sacred, touches on religious trauma, and offers gentle ways to rebuild meaning, at your own pace.
Read on Substack → · Related: Grief & Loss →
Doing As an Extension of Being
Many of us were taught to approach work from a sense of lack, so we keep betraying our own limits. A reflection on making your work an expression of your life, rather than proof of your worth.
HEALING THROUGH RECONNECTION
Ready to go beyond reading?
Understanding your patterns is a powerful first step. If you’re ready for support that attends to your mind, your body, your relationships, and your sense of meaning, let’s talk.
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