Complex Relational Trauma, Empathy, and Why CPTSD Survivers Can Feel “Too Much”

[TheBigBlue]

The thoughts here were inspired by an exchange in NarcKiddo's Recovery Journal. 

I feel like a fool. [...] nobody likes being played. [...] I have not the slightest interest in going out of my way to be helpful in the future.

And Chart's question:

NK, this makes me wonder where Empathy comes from. [...] Why do so many foo seem absolutely oblivious to something I believe is a fundamental aspect of being human?

This made me think deeply about Empathy.

In a video Chart posted a few weeks ago

Dr. Allan N. Schore - Modern attachment theory; the enduring impact of early right-brain development
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0sKY86Qmzo

Prof. Schore mentioned that empathy is largely a right-hemisphere function, and that he was preparing to speak to a large group of lawyers about how trauma affects empathy.

My immediate reaction was almost offended:
"Wait - if anything, I have too much empathy."
If someone starts telling a story - especially one involving animals - I often stop them and say, "If anyone gets hurt or dies, I don't want to hear it."
For them, it's a two-minute anecdote.
For me, it can be a lifetime of pain that I feel in my body.

So I paused Schore's video and asked myself a question:
Do people with CPTSD have less empathy - or more?

Here's how I now understand it.
Complex Relational Trauma, Empathy, and Why CPTSD Survivers Can Feel "Too Much"

1. Trauma does not reduce the capacity for empathy.
In fact, many CPTSD survivors show heightened empathic sensitivity.

But what trauma does impair is something more subtle - but crucial:
The ability to feel others' emotions without losing oneself.

2. Empathy needs a stable self to rest on
In healthy development:
a child develops a cohesive sense of self through safe, consistent co-regulation. Empathy then emerges on top of that self. You can feel with others - and return to yourself.

In CPTSD, especially developmental trauma:
inner safety was never reliably established; the "self" remains fragile or underdeveloped. Empathy develops anyway - but it has nowhere stable to land. So instead of empathy sitting on top of the self ... empathy can end up replacing the self.

What that looks like in real life:
- you don't just observe another's pain, but you become flooded by it
- you lose track of your own needs
- your nervous system reacts as if the pain were your own
=> This isn't kindness gone wrong.
It's a trauma adaptation.

What looks like "too much empathy" is often a combination of:
threat detection ("I must feel what others feel - to anticipate danger, prevent harm, or preserve connection") AND
hyper-attunement without regulation.

3. Right-brain dominance without right-brain safety
Neuroscience helps explain this:
- empathy, emotional resonance, and nonverbal communication are largely right-hemisphere functions;
- trauma, especially early trauma, leads to right-brain dominance
- but without secure attachment, that right brain develops without safety

=> So you get:
- intense emotional resonance
- exquisite sensitivity
- fast detection of distress
- but without the ability to modulate, contain, or step back.

That's why stories hurt. That's why we get pulled into the runarounds of our FOO's. Not because we are weak - but because our nervous systems never learned boundaries for empathy.

4. For completeness: CPTSD does not look the same in everyone
Survivors can also oscillate between two poles:
A. Trauma-based hyper-empathy:
- intense
- involuntary
- exhausting
- boundary-less
=> It feels like: "I feel what you feel because I had to - not because I choose to."

B. Empathy shutdown / dissociation:
- emotional numbing
- withdrawal
- reduced resonance

5. Why this matters in daily life
This helps explain why:
- other people's obliviousness feels shocking or cruel
- we're exhausted by "small" stories others shrug off
- we struggle to know when to put ourselves first
- we feel deeply - but often feel unseen in return

6. Something I found online that made me cry (unknown source)
"When a person grows up feeling unseen, they learn to love by overgiving.
They pour into everyone else, hoping that one day, someone will finally pour back into them.
They become the caretaker, the fixer - the one who shows up even when no one shows up for them.
And the hardest part?
Deep down, they're not trying to be strong.
They're just waiting for someone to do for them what they've spent their whole life doing for everyone else."

So, maybe the 'obliviousness' that Chart mentioned, comes from a collision:
The parents who traumatized us came from different maladaptive directions
— some narcissistic/extractive
— some boundary-collapsing (horizontal enmeshment) and need-driven
— some avoidant or dissociative

Those patterns then crash into a child's survival adaptations
— hyper-attunement and awareness
— fawning
— unregulated co-empathy
— self-erasure

And what emerges is exactly what hurts so deeply: the feeling that something fundamentally human - reciprocal empathy - is missing.

Maybe the work isn't to harden ourselves against people who seem oblivious, but to build enough inner safety that empathy no longer requires us to disappear.
Not less empathy - but regulated empathy.🙂

How? I don't have this fully figured out yet, but it likely involves:
- building a cohesive inner self
- learning that empathy can be chosen, not automatic
- discovering that you can feel with someone without losing yourself.

(If it is ok)

[NarcKiddo]

Thanks for starting this thread.

It was a revelation to me that people could feel one way while holding space and emotions for someone who is feeling quite different. That it is possible to acknowledge and explore someone else's feelings without letting them take over oneself. Of course it makes logical sense that it is possible. This must be a skill therapists have, or they would surely sink under all the weight of their clients' troubles.

[Armee]

Wow. Reciprocal empathy. That feels like the crux of growing up with a parent with a personality disorder.

[Teddy bear]

Regarding empathy, IMO traumatised people are not always empathetic. Probably some other factors influence it.

[Armee]

Yeah that's true Teddy Bear. I do wonder what causes one person to head toward a CPTSD presentation, one toward personality disorder, one toward schizophrenia, and one toward psychopathy.

[Teddy bear]

Yeah that's true Teddy Bear. I do wonder what causes one person to head toward a CPTSD presentation, one toward personality disorder, one toward schizophrenia, and one toward psychopathy.

Exactly, and some comorbidities are also possible, which makes it even more complex...
Probably genetics, epigenetics, environmental factors etc

And also misdiagnoses...
As for me most of that labels are kind of outdated: imho most of the conditions are connected with trauma.

[Chart]

Quickly, off-subject (a little) I believe EVERYTHING is trauma, from cancer to suicide, from dictatorship to messiah. From the distant past to recurrent nightmares. The variable is only how it manifests. (Just my opinion, and I might be excessive... I have that tendency :-)

Empathy... I got it bad. But I was valued during that critical phase. I was the savior, so the hope of my salvation powers had a double-edged effect: I was the center of the universe for my mom, but the expectations were total délirium. So it didn't work, I was washed in violence and confusion, and went the path of "prediction" and "comprehension". I know how people are feeling, more often than not, far better than they know themselves how they are feeling. I can "see" it instantly, and for more complex situations, a few days of unconscious reflection will frequently lead me to deep (insane?) realizations of others and/or specific situations.

I don't typically lose myself in these situations, but it is rarely anything that I can do anything about. So I don't (never?) go down those perceptive roads.

EXCEPT with like-Empaths. (I think there is an unofficial term for this, 'super-Empath'. I find most people here on the forum to be in this category. It goes along with being highly sensitive. No judgments, just my perception/belief/opinion.

Yes, all this came about for survival reasons. I was also groomed for it. Now I have it, but it doesn't particularly help me. Except I am now applying it to my inners. Especially the baby who was dipped in Fear like Achilles in the Styx... but I'm far from invincible, quite the contrary.

I also apply empathy to myself now, more and more, especially since understanding what I suffer from. I also have stopped A LOT of my "going towards analyzing others". I just shut the equipment off when I realize it's going that way. But the exception is with people like me. But even then I'm careful. I do still want to do "good" but have learned, "good" is relative, and I'm a voyager here just like everybody else.

I think there's a subtle but important difference between empathy in men and women. Possibly it's easier for men to "get past it" than women. But that's just a hunch and for sure not any kind of global rule.

My mother: I have immense amounts of empathy for my mom. But I'm still nc (or very very low). Too much is too much, and hope is not in very good shape. My mom is also empathic-capable, but only narcissistically. And she is inexperienced and NEVER turned to catch even a glimpse of her shadow. And her shadow in not grey, it's as black as they come. I can't do much there, I'm probably the only person on earth who sees this (huge) part of her. But she was traumatized in her turn, just like the poem by Philippe Larkin...

[Kizzie]

Hey Big Blue, as often happens when I read your posts I find myself saying "Yes!"

Several years ago I came across something to do with the being "other-referenced" versus "self-referenced". It rang so true because in my family of origin I had to constantly be on the lookout for anger leading to abuse/neglect so I was very "other-referenced" as a way of keeping as safe as I could. This carried over to all my encounters with others and I kept losing myself. I did not know who I was and how to reside in my own body. I always allowed myself to be pulled out by others and the main strategy I had was to be overly interested in them and overly empathetic to anything they were going through. It was a kind of fawning response but it did keep me safe or so I thought. What that led to is as you write "And what emerges is exactly what hurts so deeply: the feeling that something fundamentally human - reciprocal empathy - is missing."  I did not ask for reciprocity, I made it seem like I didn't need it so of course people were happy to talk about themselves. It's not something that grows genuine relationships though.

At some point I knew I had to start self-referencing and it was difficult I will admit. There was no roadmap other than when I felt myself being overly concerned with others I needed to pull back and try to look after me. That felt selfish for the longest while. I also starting pulling back from people who only have the capacity to talk about themselves. Now people who do that actually make me angry because I grew up with N's and it drags me back to my roots, a place I don't want to go. When you can't get a word in edgewise it says something about that person, and it's nothing I want to rescue them from anymore or expend my energy on. That sounds a bit brutal as I write it, but I am not talking about people who need genuine empathy, support, compassion, etc. It's those who are only to happy to take up airspace without reciprocity - big red flag for me these days.

Anyway, now I feel like I am much more regulated which is to say it feels like I have an authentic interest in others and genuine empathy that I don't get lost in. I do still have to watch myself because old habits die hard, but what helps is knowing about being self versus other referenced. I can hear myself telling myself nowadays to stay in my body and make sure I remain regulated in relationships.

Great post, thanks!

[TheBigBlue]

Thanks, Kizzie, this really landed for me.

The distinction between other-referenced and self-referenced feels like one of those concepts that explains an entire life in a single axis.

I've had several moments recently where that invisibility – that lack of reciprocity – suddenly snapped into focus.

1) I finally shared my CPTSD diagnosis with a friend – someone I'd been there for, emotionally, for years. Her response was: "Doesn't everyone feel that way?" That was the moment I realized how much of our relationship had been sustained by me holding space without ever asking for it back. Since then, when she starts container-dumping on me again, I have a clear sense of "this is one-directional." (We still collaborate professionally, so I'm careful, but the awareness alone has changed how much it hurts.)

2) A video chat with my "golden child" sister. The classic me-me-me for 15 minutes, then she says "and how is your life going?" In the two seconds it took me to take a breath to answer, she restarted the me-me-me monologue – another 10 minutes before the call ended. With the newly gained awareness, I can treat this as data now – or even chuckle internally at how comical that slapstick scene feels.

3) But the most striking aha moment came up in therapy recently. I told my therapist about having pneumonia years ago – completely alone, thinking I might die – and realizing that I never once thought "I don't want to die."
My only thought was how devastated my (very enmeshed) mother would be if I did. When my therapist gently pointed out that this reflected an absence of self-reference / lack of self – that even in a life-threatening moment my focus was entirely on someone else's emotional state – something clicked in a way it never had before.

The whole de-enmeshing and learning to self-reference is still very fresh. There's no internal roadmap yet – just moments where I notice I've disappeared and try to come back into my body, into my own needs, before I vanish completely.
"Baby steps" – sometimes it's just awareness instead of self-blame.
On the path to reciprocity as a requirement, not a luxury.

Thank you for putting words to this so clearly. It makes the work feel a little less lonely – and reassures me that I'm on the right path, no matter how dysregulating this path sometimes feels. 💛 

[Marcine]

From Pete Walker's Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, in the chapter called "Silver Linings", page 80.

"We live in an emotionally impoverished culture, and those who stick with a long term recovery process are often rewarded with emotional intelligence far beyond the norm. This is somewhat paradoxical, as survivors of childhood trauma are initially injured more grievously in their emotional natures than those in the general population.

"...Those who work an effective recovery program not only recover significantly from emotional damage, but also evolve out of the emotional impoverishment of the general society."

Pete goes on to write in that chapter about the silver linings in recovery— building relational intelligence, creating authentic and reciprocal relationships, ongoing learning, inner wisdom, self respect, resilience.

Yes to being on the right and good path, BigBlue.

And yes to being in such good company here on the forum

[Kizzie]

It is difficult Big Blue, or at least it was for me. I pretty much had to stop myself each time for a long while and figure out if I was other referencing. If I did not feel like I/my needs were being taken into account, either by me or the other person I would make a real effort to pull back inside my body and end the one-sided dialogue ASAP.

When my NM was alive she would talk right over top of me (and I let her because if I didn't she would do the hurt thing) until one day I could see very clearly she was making me invisible in the process and it really hurt every time she did it). I just up and calmly and firmly said something to the effect of "Wait a minute please, I didn't finish what I was saying" and it stopped her cold. The next time she did it I out and out told her she needed to stop talking over top of me, that it was rude and made me feel bad. She was very much taken aback but she finally learned I had boundaries, that I was not just a set of ears put on this earth to listen to her prattle on and on.

A bit of a chuckle - my H is awesome at dealing with people who hog the stage. We had a neighbour some time back who would talk endlessly and had me caught one day. My H just started up the lawnmower near where we were talking and that gave me an out. Can't talk over that!     

[TheBigBlue]

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