Emily Chan
Toxic family dynamics can come in various forms. Most of the time, children exposed to parental instability feel like they have to walk on eggshells around their caregivers.
Living in an unhealthy environment during childhood damages a kid’s emotional development in ways that are invisible to the eye. As a result, individuals are left with hidden traumas that stay with them even as adults.
Dr. Kim Sage (@drkimsage) is a licensed psychologist, and she’s talking about “eggshell” parents and the complex PTSD trauma that often occurs in kids as the result of growing up in a household with a lot of unpredictability.
Here are some of the common symptoms that people with CPTSD display. They live in hypervigilance. This means that they overthink everything, read too much into situations, and feel overwhelming emotions.
They are constantly in a state of assessment, always analyzing someone’s facial expressions and listening for certain sounds, like the noise of car tires rolling into the driveway.
They just can’t turn off their security system mode unless they are alone. When they are completely alone, it’s often the only time they don’t feel like they’re in that state.
Individuals with CPTSD usually have some sort of chronic mental or physical illness, such as anxiety or an autoimmune disease. The illness signifies that there’s a lot of turmoil going on in their bodies, even though others might not be able to see it.
And no matter how introverted or extroverted they are, they often find social situations very depleting because they’re overanalyzing every aspect of it.
They’re thinking about what’s going to happen before the event, during the event, and after the event. Therefore, it takes a solid day or two to recover from the exhaustion of it all.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
