Experiencing a traumatic event can have a negative impact on your teen’s mental and physical health, their ability to foster interpersonal relationships, and their overall wellbeing. These events are painful and life-altering, and often require professional help in order for teens to recover from their trauma.
While it can be a challenge for teens to heal after experiencing a traumatic event, helping them recover from complex trauma can be even more complicated.
Complex trauma occurs when individuals have multiple, ongoing exposures to traumatic events that have a lasting impact on their life. When teens suffer from complex trauma, instead of working through the pain from a single, isolated traumatic event, they have to learn to cope after experiencing a lifetime of repeated traumatic events, which is often easier said than done.
The effects of complex trauma
Complex trauma can affect your teen in myriad ways. Here are some of the most common effects of complex trauma that you might notice in your teen:
Difficulty forming healthy relationships
Complex trauma can take the form of sexual, physical, or emotional childhood abuse, neglect, or any other longstanding abuse that has impacted their lives. These traumatic events are typically personal in nature and often occur within relationships, which make it especially difficult for teens with complex trauma to learn to trust other people or develop healthy interpersonal relationships with others. After being let down or harmed time and time again, your teen may believe that they no longer can rely on other people. As a result of complex trauma, some teens begin to lose faith that it is even possible for caring, consistent, positive relationships to even exist.
Heightened stress levels
The body’s “fight or flight” response is integral to survival in life-threatening situations; however, when the body is constantly in this state, it will cause more harm than good. When teens have experienced ongoing abuse, they develop a heightened stress response to protect themselves, after all, they have learned that they can face a threat at any moment.
After weeks, months, or even years of having to be prepared for the worst, it can be hard for their body to regulate its nervous system, causing them to remain in this fight or flight mode even when they are in a safe environment.
These high-stress levels can take a toll on their physical and mental health. The body was not meant to be under extreme stress for prolonged periods of time, and having a consistently high heart rate, rapid breathing, anxiety, and muscle tension will wear on a teen’s mind and the body.
Strong emotional responses
Have you ever done or said something seemingly small or insignificant only for your teen to overreact and blow everything out of proportion? This can be a natural response to complex trauma. Even actions and words that might seem harmless can trigger your teen and remind them of their traumatic experiences, causing them to lash out in anger, put up a defensive wall, start crying, or react in other seemingly irrational ways.
These strong emotional responses can interfere with their day-to-day life, and it can make it difficult for them to connect with others.
Negative core beliefs
After experiencing complex trauma, many teens begin to feel hopelessness and shame. This can lead them to adopt negative core beliefs about themselves or their futures.
If you’ve noticed your teen saying things like, “I’m disgusting,” or “I’m worthless,” or “Nothing is ever going to get better,” it is a sign that they have taken on negative beliefs about themselves. This increases their risk for participating in unhealthy behaviors, engaging in self-harm, or having suicidal thoughts.
Complex trauma can have a drastic effect on your teen’s life, so it is important that you help them receive the support, care, and professional treatment they need as soon as possible.
Creative Healing can help.
Although it may be a challenging journey at first, helping your teen heal from complex trauma is possible with the right resources. Creative Healing uses evidence-based therapies like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), and Attachment- Family Based Therapy to treat complex therapy.
We can help your teen process the trauma they’ve experienced, learn to form healthy relationships with others, reframe negative situations and thought patterns, develop coping strategies when they are faced with triggers, and discover effective methods for managing their emotions.