Complex Trauma.

Dissociation.

Lived Experience.

Supporting advocacy, education, and community, so survivors can live.

When sunlight is scarce, sunflowers turn toward one another for warmth and light. In the same way, survivors need spaces where turning toward one another is not just allowed, but empowered and celebrated. This is a liberation framework that resists colonial and systemic harms, where healing refuses isolation, shame, or silence, and instead honors resilience, voice, and dignity. Sunflowers not only face each other for light; they pull the harsh minerals from the ground and turn them into seeds that restore the earth as an act of resistance and regeneration that mirrors how survivors metabolize systemic harms into strength, solidarity, and collective renewal. Like the Jewish vision of tikkun olam (repairing the world) and the Indigenous teachings of the healing circle, where everyone belongs and healing is shared, we find strength not in being “fixed” or pathologized, but in being centered in ourselves, empowered by resources, and connected to our community.

While Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often follows a single overwhelming traumatic event, complex PTSD (CPTSD) usually comes from repeated or long-term trauma that is usually chronic or ongoing… especially when harm happens in relationships or systems that were supposed to nurture and protect us. Examples include:

• Foster care and/or adoption: impact of relational and attachment traumas on development, even in utero; ruptures when attachment needs are not supported during early childhood development; or when secrecy, coercion, or multiple placements disrupt safety;

• Sibling death or parental grief: when a child loses a sibling or when a parent is overwhelmed by their own grief, leaving the child without the comfort, attention, or stability they need; the trauma of absence (when a parent’s grief or a sibling’s death leaves a child without comfort, stability, or recognition); and/or relational rupture (the caregiver emotionally unavailable or absent because of grief);

• Alcohol or substance abuse: when a caregiver’s use creates unpredictability, emotional distance, or unsafe environments, children often learn to silence their own needs in order to survive;

• Parental absence: whether through work, illness, migration, or other circumstances, a caregiver’s physical or emotional unavailability can leave a child feeling unsafe, unseen, or alone;

• Parentification: when a child must take on adult roles or emotional caregiving for parents or siblings;

• Chronic neglect: emotional, physical, or developmental needs not being met over time;

• Deprivation of food, shelter, medical care, nurture, or affection;

• Family violence or abuse that is repeated and normalized in the home;

• Relational betrayal: being hurt by those meant to protect (caregivers, teachers, clergy, institutions);

• Systemic oppression: racism, colonization, homophobia, antisemitism, or other forms of cultural violence that carry across generations;

• Institutional trauma: foster care, residential schools, or other systems where children are separated from family, language, land, or culture; or

• Organized exploitation or trafficking, where exploitation is repeated and reinforced by a network of control.

Both PTSD and CPTSD can leave the body stuck in survival mode, where alarm bells never seem to turn off, and where we may dissociate from what has happened to us, how we feel about it, or the fact that what we have endured was traumatic. This is why the risk of suicide for trauma survivors is so high: carrying such weight alone can feel unbearable, and survivors are conditioned to experience the world without intervention or hope.

This is our hope: our brains are built for healing in community, even as adult children of trauma and dysfunction. Our wounds are relational, and our healing must be relational. Safety was never about the absence of danger, but about the presence of support. Recent neuroscience shows that new connections can form when we experience steady care, co-regulation, and community. We liberate ourselves as we turn toward each other in safe and healthy ways.

System Speak “sunflowers” (3 s’s) come together during System Speak Symposia (3 s’s again) to apply a simple slang slogan (3 s’s again!) of the 3 c’s from recovery: we didn’t cause what happened to us as children; we can’t control what is happening in our environment or the lives of our caregivers when we are children; and we can’t change (or “cure”) what has already happened in the past. What can we do? We can contribute compassion to ourselves and each other through community. Those are the 3 c’s that empower us in the present: contributing, compassion, community.

Healing doesn’t happen only in therapy, and recovery is more than reading the literature. Just as clinicians meet in “clinical consultations” to share wisdom and sharpen skills, survivors also need spaces to share experience, strength, and hope while putting into practice what they are learning and applying from therapy and recovery. We call these reflective client consultations: collaborative gatherings that go beyond peer support, where lived experience is honored with seriousness and care, and where the depth of survivor wisdom is valued alongside, not beneath, clinical knowledge. These are boundaried and intentional spaces where community itself becomes part of the healing. Like sunflowers turning toward one another for warmth, we turn toward ourselves and each other for life. Connection brings healing.