Living with Complex PTSD often means living with Complex PTSD nightmares.
Complex PTSD nightmares are not the occasional, frightening dreams that disturb the sleep of most of the untraumatized population. Instead, these anxiety-riddled mental pictures and bodily responses happen frequently. They wreak havoc on your ability to sleep or even feel comfortable closing your eyes to rest your anxious mind.
In short, complex PTSD nightmares can be brutal on the mental state and attitude of a PTSD sufferer.
Do you find that traumas of your past revisit you with frightening regularity each night? Are you tense and nervous when you go to bed? Are you sleeping alone or away from your partner or other family members so you won’t accidentally wake or harm them during the throes of the dreams?
Complex PTSD nightmares persist, coming between you and your health as well as you and your relationships. And no doubt, you want to be free of them. To find relief, it is important to understand what these nightmares are trying to tell you.
What Do Complex PTSD Nightmares Mean?
Why are nightmares such a common part of the C-PTSD experience? What do they tell us about how we experience trauma. What do they mean as it pertains to your recovery?
You Are Re-experiencing Distress and Regret
People with C-PTSD have an unfortunate superpower. That is, you are able to access and relive your terrible trauma with a depth of experience that others don’t grasp. As a result, your connection to your unwanted memories completely disrupts whatever you are doing. If you are awake, you may experience flashbacks or body sensations that ruin the activities and enjoyment of the present moment. If you are in bed, complex PTSD nightmares can undo your attempts to rest.
Remembered thoughts, sensations, and emotions come together without daytime distraction to interfere with restorative sleep as you lay down at night. All told, they remind you of their ability to keep you stuck in the past, in a heightened state of reactivity.
You Are Unable to Process Your Traumatic Memories Effectively
In the aftermath of your traumatic experiences, your mind and body developed a magnified, dysfunctional version of the fight or flight response. Unlike those who are able to experience trauma and put it into workable personal contexts, your C-PTSD keeps you stuck. And your nightmares not only keep you reliving the experience but impede your ability to soothe and solve the emotional problems created by your past.
Complex PTSD nightmares mean that your mind is still interpreting and responding to the trauma intensely. They mean that your body is unable to unload trauma-related sensations. You’re not yet equipped to incorporate or contextualize the trauma and release it. With that said, your nighttime drama is really the drama of trauma-related memories that don’t fade or integrate into your life.
Beressal Vanderkolk, the best selling author of the Body Keeps Score wrote, "...some aspects of traumatic events appear to get fixed in the mind, unaltered by the passage of time or by the intervention of subsequent experience. For example, in our own studies on post traumatic nightmares, subjects claimed that they saw the same traumatic scenes over and over again without modification over a fifteen year period."
You Need Help Coping with the Effects of Your Trauma
Essentially, your nightmares mean that your brain and body both 1) re-live your past trauma repeatedly and 2) retain that trauma internally, stuck and unprocessed.
But your nightmares mean something more as well. Your complex PTSD nightmares are signals that you need help.
They are indicating to you that the past is still too much of your present. A frightening, disruptive, exhausting part, that you haven't been able to manage on your own.
That’s okay. There’s no shame in admitting that the nightmares are happening and you don’t yet know how to stop them. The point is that you can use your dreams as information about what steps to take next.
Complex PTSD nightmares are not rare. In fact, research over the past decade indicates that upwards of 80 percent of C-PTSD sufferers experience them. Reach out for help. Don’t let unwanted memories and a lack of sleep isolate you or take a larger toll on your well-being. I’m here to help you put the past to bed so that you can move forward, refreshed and free.
If you would like some extra support overcoming PTSD nightmares please contact me below for a free 30 minute consultation. I am a compassionate therapist who can help you find calm and rest.
To find out more about my services click here: PTSD Treatment. Serving Boulder, Longmont, Denver...
