The Complex Trauma Podcast

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• Why Your Nervous System Craves Certainty (And Why It Looks Like Control) 01.07.2026 18分

  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...
• Emotional Flashbacks in Complex Trauma Explained 24.06.2026 36分

  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 p...
• Complex Trauma and the Belief That You're a Burden 17.06.2026 20分

  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...
• Why Complex Trauma Survivors Struggle to Believe Themselves 10.06.2026 29分

  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 fragmen...
• Why Emotional Loneliness Runs So Deep in Complex Trauma 03.06.2026 31分

  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 mech...
• What CPTSD Does to Your Sleep and Why Nothing Else Has Worked 27.05.2026 32分

  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: Why s...
• What Inner Child Healing and Reparenting Actually Looks Like 20.05.2026 38分

  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: Why the inner child wound shows up as exhau...
• Corrective Emotional Experiences After Childhood Emotional Neglect 13.05.2026 33分

  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 ...
• CPTSD and the Stack of Diagnoses Nobody Connects 06.05.2026 37分

  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 tr...
• It's Not People-Pleasing, It's Fawning 29.04.2026 36分

  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...
• When Being Seen Can Feel Unsafe in Therapy for CPTSD with Katie Fries 22.04.2026 37分

  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 an...
• The Inner Critic, IFS, and Complex Trauma with Emily Pagone 15.04.2026 34分

  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 wh...
• I Finally Stopped Shrinking… and Still Got Hurt 08.04.2026 29分

  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...
• Complex Trauma, Motherhood, and Cycle Breaking with Libby Ward 01.04.2026 47分

  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," an...
• The Hidden Shame in Emotional Neglect 25.03.2026 26分

  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...
• How Complex Trauma Shows Up in Your Sex Life— with Rachael Garner 18.03.2026 36分

  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 durin...
• Why You Freeze or Shut Down When Things Get Hard 11.03.2026 18分

  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 ...
• Why Nervous System Regulation Feels Impossible With CPTSD 04.03.2026 30分

  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 d...
• Childhood Emotional Neglect with Dr. Danica Harris 25.02.2026 34分

  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 hea...
• 3 Dissociation Questions Everyone's Asking (Answered) 18.02.2026 19分

  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: Why you might dissociate MORE in therapy than anywhere else (and why that doesn't mean therapy isn't working)How to tell the difference between zoning out and actual dissociationWhy you can tell your trauma story without feeling anything, and what that really meansIf you've ever driven ...