When someone asks me whether there's a difference between PTSD and Complex PTSD, my answer is yes and no. The first distinction I make is that trauma, complex trauma, and developmental trauma are the things that happened to you. PTSD and Complex PTSD are the things that you get as a result. They are not the same thing. In the United States, the DSM-5 recognizes Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as the diagnosis. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) recognizes Compl

I sometimes hear people ask, “I think I have trauma, but I’m not sure. How do I know if I have trauma?” I generally do not answer that question immediately. Instead, I respond by asking, “Why do you think you have trauma?” I know that something has compelled that person to come into my office. Something has become uncomfortable in their life, and I want to hear their explanation before I give mine. Sometimes people can point to a specific event, such as an assault, an abusive

Almost everyone experiences anxiety from time to time. But many people don't really understand what anxiety is or why it happens. The first thing I tell clients is this: Fear and anxiety are related, but they are not the same thing. Fear is your nervous system responding to a danger that is present. If a car is about to hit you or a venomous snake is at your feet, fear is appropriate. It prepares your body to protect itself. Anxiety, on the other hand, is anticipatory. It is

Before I founded Waypoint Psychotherapy in 2023, I had been a solo practitioner for a number of years. Once it was time for me to expand my counseling practice to include other clinicians, I had to decide what kind of practice I was going to build, what its core identity was going to be, and what its values were going to be. The decisions that I made at that time shaped what Waypoint would become, especially as it added the voices of the people who came to join me here over t