01/09/2026
September is CPTSD Awareness Month and I need this to reach as many people as possible. 💚
Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is one of the most misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and overlooked mental health conditions that exists. And the cruelest part is that the people who have it often spend years, sometimes decades, not knowing what it is. Not knowing that what they are experiencing has a name. Not knowing that their responses make sense. Not knowing that they are not broken.
So for this entire month I want to use this page to make some noise about it. Because CPTSD Awareness Month is not just about putting a label on something. It is about changing the way we talk about trauma. It is about making sure that the person scrolling at 2am who has been told their whole life that they are too sensitive, too much, too dramatic, too needy finally finds something that says no. You were never too much. You were just never given the right information.
Let me start with the basics.
CPTSD is not the same as PTSD. PTSD typically develops after a single traumatic event. CPTSD develops after prolonged, repeated trauma, especially trauma that happened inside relationships, inside homes, inside the places and with the people that were supposed to be safe. It is the result of being unsafe for a long time with no way out. And it doesn’t just leave memories. It rewires the nervous system. It reshapes identity. It changes the way a person experiences love, connection, rest, and safety at the most fundamental level.
It comes from childhoods where love was conditional. From households where you never knew what mood was waiting behind the door. From relationships where you were slowly and quietly convinced that your needs were too much and your feelings were not real. From years of being invalidated, controlled, neglected, or manipulated by the people you depended on most.
And because it builds slowly, because it rarely looks like one dramatic moment, so many survivors spend years minimizing their own experience. Telling themselves it wasn’t that bad. Reminding themselves that other people had it worse. Wondering why they can’t just get over it already.
Here is what I want every survivor to hear this September.
You are not too sensitive. Your nervous system is responding to real information it was given over a long period of time. You are not broken. You adapted to an environment that required adaptation just to survive. You are not dramatic. You are someone whose body learned to brace for impact because impact came often enough to prepare for. And you are not too much. You were just never in spaces that knew how to hold what you were carrying.
CPTSD shows up as hypervigilance that never turns off. As emotional flashbacks that arrive without images, just feelings, sudden, overwhelming, and disconnected from the present moment. As a deep uncertainty about who you are outside of survival mode. As relationships that feel impossible to trust and impossible to leave at the same time. As a body that is exhausted in ways sleep doesn’t fix. As a persistent low hum of shame that has no single source but seems to color everything.
And it shows up in the quieter ways too. In the apologies you give before you’ve done anything wrong. In the way you make yourself small in rooms you deserve to fill. In the way you monitor everyone else’s emotions while having almost no access to your own. In the way rest feels like something you have to earn. In the way kindness from safe people still makes something in you brace for the catch.
This is not who you are. This is what you learned. And what was learned can, with time and the right support, be unlearned.
Healing from CPTSD is not about getting over it. It is not about forgiving and moving on. It is not about positive thinking or staying strong or just calming down. It is about building safety inside yourself when you were never shown what safety felt like. It is about teaching your nervous system, slowly and repeatedly, that it is allowed to rest now. It is about grieving the childhood you deserved and didn’t get, the self you couldn’t be, the years you spent surviving instead of living. And it is about learning, maybe for the first time, that you are allowed to take up space. That your needs are not too much. That you are worthy of the same compassion you have given to everyone else your entire life.
This month I will be posting more than usual. More education. More validation. More of the honest, real conversations this community was built for. Because every person who finally understands what they have been carrying deserves to understand it fully. Not in clinical language that makes them feel like a case study. But in real words that make them feel seen.
If you have CPTSD or think you might, you are in the right place. Stay close this month. 💜
And if you know someone who has been struggling without answers, who has been told their whole life that something is wrong with them, who is exhausted in ways they can’t explain, please share this post. You might be sending them the words they have been looking for their entire life.
CPTSD Awareness Month. September. Let’s make some noise. 💜🤗
