Helianis Quijada Salazar, LCSW, PMH-C

Past experiences — especially those involving violence, abuse, chronic stress, or loss — don't just live in our memory. They live in our body, in our nervous system's responses, in the ways we learned to protect ourselves when protection was necessary. Those behaviors made sense once. And perhaps it is time to let them go. In our work together, we can begin to understand them with curiosity and compassion.

As your therapist, my role is to walk alongside you as we foster a relationship that allows for healing to happen. Once we have established that, we can begin to explore the past in a way that feels right to you. There is not timeline, not checklist.

Healing is not about erasing the past or arriving at a place where pain no longer exists. It's about developing a new relationship with your past — one where you are no longer defined by what happened to you.

Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder develops not from a single event, but from repeated or prolonged experiences of harm, neglect, or chronic stress. For many people, this begins in childhood — in homes where a parent wasn't emotionally or physically available, where needs went unmet, or where harm was caused directly. For others, it takes shape in adulthood: through toxic or abusive relationships, repeated violations of trust or safety, or simply living in survival mode for so long that it started to feel like the only way to exist.

What makes complex trauma so hard to name is that it rarely looks like what people expect trauma to look like. It shows up quietly — in the way you move through the world, in the stories you tell yourself about your worth, in the walls you build around the parts of you that have been hurt before.

If you are living with CPTSD, you might find yourself feeling unmoored or on edge without always knowing why. You might carry a deep sense of not being enough — no matter what you do or how hard you try. You might struggle to feel at home in your own body, or find it difficult to get close to people, always bracing for the moment things fall apart. You might feel disconnected from yourself, your emotions, or the people around you — and wonder if that distance will ever close.

It can. Healing from complex trauma is possible, and it doesn't require you to have it all figured out before you begin. It just requires a space that is safe enough to start.