Living With the Tiger

**Trigger Warning- this letter talks about the impacts of CPTSD

We need each other as much as we need food and water.

Connection is not a luxury. It is not something the strong outgrow. It is a biological requirement, wired into us from the very first breath.

The research bears this out. We learned, heartbreakingly, from infants in orphanages whose physical needs were met but whose human needs were not. They were fed, kept warm, kept clean. But without being held, without touch, attunement, and connection, many experienced what’s called failure to thrive, and some did not survive. The body cannot grow on food and water alone. We are built, from the start, to need each other.

There’s another finding that makes this even starker. When researchers look at brain scans of children who were severely neglected, they often see fewer neural connections than in the brains of children who were actively abused. Sit with that for a moment. The absence of connection can mark a developing brain even more deeply than the presence of harm. Sometimes what wounds us most is not what was done to us. It’s what we needed and never received.

Once you understand that, trauma starts to make a different kind of sense.

Because if connection is a survival need, then a threat to our connection, to our belonging, to our sense of self in relationship, is a threat to survival. Trauma was never only about a threat to our life. Trauma is any event that leaves a mark that distorts the lens through which we see ourselves and others. Any wound that makes authentic connection harder.

That’s a much wider definition than most people use, and I’ll be honest with you about where I stand. I believe almost everything we struggle with has a trauma root. The patterns, the reactions, the beliefs we can’t seem to shake. Underneath, there is almost always a wound, and that wound almost always formed in a relationship.

PTSD is being chased by a tiger. CPTSD is living with one.

PTSD is what happens after we survive a threat. And it doesn’t have to be a threat to our life. It can be any threat to our sense of self. Being humiliated, rejected, made small, told over and over that who we are is wrong. The body registers those as danger too.

CPTSD is what happens when that threat isn’t a single event but a way of life. When it’s relational. When the people we depended on were also the ones we weren’t safe with, and we grew up alongside the danger instead of escaping it. There was no one tiger to outrun. We lived in the house with it.

What happens when the tiger appears

When a threat hits, your brain has a built-in order of operations.

The back part of the brain, the reptilian hindbrain, and the middle part, the limbic emotional brain, both fire instantly. Dan Siegel calls what happens next flipping your lid. The two lower brains pop the top off the neocortex, the human, rational part of your brain, and it goes offline. This is by design. When a tiger is chasing you, there is no time to reason. You need to run.

And while you’re running, your brain is doing something remarkable. It is encoding everything. Every sound, every smell, the snap of the twig under your foot, the light in the sky. It files it all away in the back of the brain, fast and without words.

Why? So that the next day, if you hear that same twig snap, you don’t wait around to find out whether there’s a tiger. You’re already running. There is no rational thought behind a trigger. The thinking brain was never part of the chain. That’s what makes a trigger feel so total and fast. It is the survival system doing exactly what it was built to do, reacting to the past before you can even register now.

The story we tell afterward

Here’s the part that matters most for healing.

As the danger passes and your frontal lobes come back online, they start doing their job again. They go looking for meaning. They want to explain what just happened.

And here’s what we see again and again in this work. After something painful, we almost always tell ourselves a negative story. Worse, it is usually a negative story about ourselves. I should have seen it coming. I’m too much. I’m not enough. It was my fault. A child especially does this because blaming the people they depend on is far too dangerous, so they turn it inward instead.

This is why trauma distorts the lens through which we see. Not just the lens through which we see the world. Mainly, the lens through which we see ourselves. Every threat leaves behind a story, and over a childhood of them, those stories harden into a belief about who you are. That belief feels like the truth. It isn’t. It’s just the meaning a frightened brain made in the dark.

Why it shows up in love

This connects straight back to attachment.

Your nervous system doesn’t only remember danger. It remembers what familiar feels like. If love came mixed with fear when you were small, your body filed that bundle away as normal. So later, the calm person sets off no alarm and registers as flat. No spark. And the intense one, the one whose moods you have to track, lights up every old circuit and feels like home.

That isn’t bad taste. It’s a nervous system reaching for the only version of love it was taught to recognize.

And here’s the hope

The same brain that learned all this can learn something new. The encoding isn’t permanent. The story can be rewritten. As you have new experiences with people who are actually safe, the alarm slowly learns that not every twig snap is a tiger, and the thinking brain gets to write a truer story about who you are.

You didn’t get a broken brain. You got one that learned to survive. Now it gets to learn it’s safe enough to stop running.

✦ ✦ ✦

This week’s practice

This week, we’re going to get curious about one of those stories. Not to argue with it. Just to find it and look at it in the light.

Since we are diving into something that could be traumatic, please remember Tools for Our Journey.

Most of us carry a negative belief about ourselves that runs underneath our relationships. It usually takes the shape of an “I am” statement. I am too much. I am not enough. I am unlovable. I am only wanted when I’m useful. I am safer alone.

Find somewhere quiet and ask yourself this. When it comes to love and belonging, what is my negative I am statement?

Let it come without editing it. You might feel it in your body before you find the words. Notice when you first remember believing it. Notice whose voice it sounds like, if it sounds like anyone’s. You don’t have to fix it or talk yourself out of it. Naming it is the work for today, because you can’t rewrite a story you can’t see.

If this brings up a lot, go gently. Put a hand where you feel it, and remember, this belief was a meaning your brain made in the dark. It was never the truth about you.

✦ ✦ ✦

You came by every one of these stories honestly. They were the meaning a frightened, growing brain made of a frightening world. They kept you bracing, and bracing kept you ready. But you’re allowed to find out who you are without the story now.

This is enough for today.

✦ ✦ ✦

With you on the path,

Erin

✦ ✦ ✦

A note on care

These letters are a companion to healing, not a substitute for therapy or medical care. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US), or your local emergency services. You deserve support that meets you in real time.

References

Ehlers, A., & Clark, D. M. (2000). A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 38(4), 319–345.

Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and recovery. Basic Books.

Maté, G. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. Avery.

Nelson, C. A., Fox, N. A., & Zeanah, C. H. (2014). Romania’s abandoned children: Deprivation, brain development, and the struggle for recovery. Harvard University Press.

Perry, B. D. (2002). Childhood experience and the expression of genetic potential. Brain and Mind, 3, 79–100.

Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Spitz, R. A. (1945). Hospitalism: An inquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 53–74.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.