From Surviving to Thriving: PTSD, Complex PTSD and the Inner Critic Nobody Told Us Was a Trauma Response

I attended fourteen schools from kindergarten through high school. That is not just a statistic about instability. That is a childhood spent perpetually learning how to be the new kid, reading rooms and decoding hierarchies and adapting to new environments with a speed and a thoroughness that the people around me called resilience and that I now understand as a nervous system doing whatever it had to do to survive constant uprootedness.This episode is about PTSD and Complex PTSD, what they actually are, how they develop, and why so many Black and brown people are walking around carrying them without ever having had a clinician look closely enough to name what they are seeing. We are going deep into Pete Walker's framework around the inner critic, the internalized voice that develops when children grow up in environments that couldn't fully hold them and that turns the pain of those environments inward, insisting for years, sometimes decades, that the person was always the problem.I carry both of these diagnoses. I am bringing you the clinical understanding and the personal truth simultaneously because I think that is the only combination that actually reaches people who have spent their whole lives being told that what they were experiencing was their fault.This is the second episode in a four part mental health series and it is one of the most important conversations I have had on this show.If anything in this episode brings up feelings that feel bigger than you can hold, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by call or text, any time.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co