The Great Misdiagnosis: Why Medical Trauma Requires a Different Lens

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

The standard treatment for PTSD is the problem. It nearly killed me. And then the standard treatment for that was even worse. It locked me into psychiatric hospitalization for 8 days and nights. There, my rights were violated, I received no individual therapy, and I was threatened with commitment if I tried to leave before my insurance benefits ran out. That combination of mistreatment left me in far worse condition than when I asked for help just 5 weeks earlier.

PTSD is not a single, uniform condition just because the mental illness industry gives it the same diagnostic label. The source, context, and ongoing nature of the threat matter enormously for how it shows up and what actually helps. 

Medical trauma is real, and for many of us, it is distinct because the threat comes from the place that is supposed to provide care, safety, and relief. When harm is repeated, sanctioned, and denied inside medical systems, the nervous system learns something very different than what it does from a one-time event.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) lens, recovery depends on whether the environment stops re-exposing the person to threat and whether their lived experience is accurately named and responded to. A generic “tailored treatment plan with a licensed therapist” fails when the therapist does not understand medical power dynamics, bodily violation, betrayal by authority, or the way ongoing medical needs keep the threat active. Coping strategies do not restore regulation when the harm is relentless.

I worked with therapists for 6.5 years and fired 13 of them. None could help me with Medical PTSD. They did not understand the physiology, relational betrayal, or cumulative harm. They defaulted to techniques designed for discrete past events, not ongoing medical exposure. They had no clue. No clue.

The current standard of care is insufficient for many people with medical trauma. If it worked, people like me would not have to build our own recovery plans from scratch just to survive.

When treatment ignores power, embodiment, and the ongoing nature of medical harm, it fails. That failure belongs to the system, not the person living with the trauma.

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Big Ways to Support Your Nervous System With Tiny Actions

Posted on January 30, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

You can support your nervous system by building small, regular practices into your daily life to support your system’s ability to find steadiness over time. These practices don’t have to be complicated or take much time; consistency is what matters most.

Daily grounding practice could mean spending a few minutes each day bringing your attention to your body in the present moment. This could be as simple as feeling your feet on the ground, noticing the texture of something in your hands, or tuning into your breath.

Gentle, rhythmic movements, like walking slowly or swaying, can also help.

Creating pockets of safety involves finding activities or places where you feel even a little bit calm or safe. This might mean sitting in a quiet corner, spending time in nature, or doing something soothing like listening to music or taking a warm bath.

Co-regulation happens when you spend time with someone who feels safe to you—someone who listens, stays calm, and doesn’t try to fix things. Even sitting quietly together can help your system feel more supported.

Pausing and resetting can help if you feel yourself getting overwhelmed. Practice pausing for a moment before responding. This might mean excusing yourself to take a few slow breaths or focusing on something neutral, like looking out a window or holding something comforting.

Developing a pre-upset ritual can be helpful when you’re not already activated. Take time to practice calming techniques like slow, gentle breathing (especially longer exhales), humming, or lightly tapping your chest or arms. These practices help build your system’s capacity to recover more quickly when you do get upset.

Repair moments matter, too. If an interaction gets heated, returning later to repair the connection with your partner is powerful. It’s okay to acknowledge the difficulty and express care. This process helps rebuild trust and connection over time.

Be patient with yourself. Building the capacity for regulation is a gradual process, and even small steps can create meaningful changes. 

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My Best Ever Hospital Experience

Posted on January 28, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

In the past few years, I had too many awful hospital experiences here in Delaware. They are a stark contrast to those I previously had in Virginia.

Twenty years ago I had a severe gallbladder attack. The pain was intense. My partner called 911, and I went to the hospital in an ambulance. By the time I was admitted the pain had eased, and I wanted to go home. The hospital told me I couldn’t. Some lab number tied to my gallbladder was still too high, so they said I had to stay for an emergency surgery. They didn’t schedule the surgery for four days.

So I was stuck in the hospital. Too sick to leave, not urgent enough to operate on. But I had plenty to keep me busy.

Ironically, I was in the final stages of planning a big event for the Science Museum of Virginia called “Emergency 911.” It covered everything from natural disasters to computer hard drive crashes. Dozens of organizations were lined up for displays and demos, but there was still a lot to do. I had my notepad and phone list and started making calls from my hospital bed.

I used my hospitalization as leverage and joked about finally seeing the other side of a 911 call. When I told the guy who had obtained a fire boat for the event that I was calling from the hospital after arriving by ambulance, he asked if I wanted a police boat too. Of course, I said yes.

I wasn’t allowed to eat, only drink. A friend brought a variety of juices and teas that weren’t normally in my budget. Drinking them was like having a treat.

I had read Patch Adams, so I knew I should keep moving. I briskly walked the halls dragging my IV pole.

My roommate was uncomfortably hot. I made an ice bag out of a surgical glove and tossed it across the room to her. She said it looked like a little doll. I had her toss it back, drew a face on it with a Sharpie, and tossed it back again. I suggested she place it between her wrists to cool her down.

That moment was significant, too. Two people noticing each other, responding, and sharing a little play changed the tone of the room.

My support was so good that I only became dysregulated when my agency disappeared as they wheeled me toward the OR.

Other than a horribly painful first night, that was by far the best hospital experience I ever had. From an Interpersonal Neurobiology perspective, this was because the conditions were the kind that help people stay regulated, even in stressful environments. I wasn’t passive or isolated. I had purpose, movement, humor, and real human contact. This experience was a perfect example of how safety and steadiness are built not by control, but through connection.

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Brutal Work: Trauma, Mushrooms, and Integration 

Posted on January 26, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Four years ago I bought “magic” mushrooms from a company in Canada. The box arrived wrapped in holiday paper. Inside was a quality t-shirt and a pair of cheap footies. At first I was alarmed that I might have been ripped off, but then I found a cardboard divider underneath. The product was behind that. The cleverness felt human and thoughtful. Care changes how the body receives experience.

I didn’t take mushrooms to have a good time, but to survive.

When I was taking mushrooms to help with Complex PTSD recovery, most of it was grueling work. Very little was enjoyable. From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) lens, that is significant. Enjoyment requires safety, shared presence, and enough internal balance to allow play. Those conditions were mostly absent from my life. I had been too isolated for too long, thanks to repeated and egregious medical and psychiatric abuse after I asked for help with severe Complex PTSD from extreme developmental trauma. Three of the disease management industry’s standard treatments nearly killed me within three years. After each, they assured me the harm wasn’t a problem because it was standard treatment.

The only two times I had fun on shrooms were when I did them with my friend and we were outside together, with her dog. There was shared presence, another mammal, nature, sound, movement, and no hierarchy. My system could settle enough to experience joy.

The first time was near her place. It was a perfectly beautiful day. The town in West Virginia bore a gash of a valley cut by a creek, an old mill race, and the remains of a stone mill. It sat below everything else and was buffered with trees, so it felt like its own little world. The roar of the water drowned out the sounds of the city. That kind of containment reduced threat and made room for connection.

The other time was in the forest near my house. That was silly and fun. Again, no performance, no fixing, no power over. Just presence.

Aside from those, I found little enjoyment in mushrooms, although it was interesting to this biology nerd. There were very few visionary experiences. From an IPNB perspective, that also makes sense. My system wasn’t seeking transcendence, but coherence. Mostly, I had insights. I put things together into a clearer picture of my lived experience, how it affected me, and how I could integrate it.

At first, and for many times after, I spent the whole trip in bed, lying there and groaning in response to the sense of healing. This was embodied integration. A system that has been held in survival for a long time doesn’t leap into joy. It moves slowly toward balance.

The best way I can describe the feeling of those trips is like the first warm spring day after an awful winter, when you go outside with your sleeves rolled up and the sun hits your skin. You feel the glow from the warmth, the hope of the returning sun, the promise of spring, and butterflies and birds, and fresh fruits and vegetables, and long evenings on the patio with friends. That’s how it felt inside my whole body. That is what coming back toward regulation feels like after prolonged threat.

I actively integrated a lot of trauma during those sessions. Memories and emotions would arise. I allowed, observed, named, and experienced the emotions involved. That sequence is important. It’s how experience becomes integrated rather than overwhelming. Then, I would soothe myself so I could come back more into balance. That back-and-forth is regulation in real time. It’s also damn hard work.

I experienced sixteen trips in sixteen weeks. After that, I went on microdosing for a few months. I had occasional trips after that. Twenty-two total. It was a lot. It was expensive. But my condition was so extreme that I needed to take extreme measures.

The only solo trip I had that wasn’t just hard work was one where I saw myself and my first pain specialist as nine-year-old kids. We were in an open space in a fruit orchard, dancing and mirroring each other. From an IPNB perspective, this was pure attunement: mutuality and resonance. There were no rules, no expertise, and no hierarchy. Just coherence between two humans. It felt sweet and innocent and attuned. It was really nice. Thinking about that trip still gives me a sunshiny feeling.

I haven’t tripped or even microdosed in a long time. My body has no interest in shrooms anymore. The shrooms have done what they could, and my body has released the need for the tool. This is the simple, hard-won effect of integration: a system, once extremely dysregulated, is now steady enough to continue recovering without that medicine.

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Welfare Systems Trap the Nervous System and Hold People Down

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

A friend also lives with severe Complex PTSD rooted in extreme developmental trauma. They are profoundly disabled by it, not because they are incapable or unmotivated, but because their nervous system learned very early that survival required constant vigilance. The welfare system they now depend on does not support recovery from that. It reinforces the original injury.

If they receive more than about $1000 in a month, even once, they risk losing all benefits. Not just temporarily. Sometimes permanently. To step out of that fragile safety net, they would suddenly need to earn $3,000 to $5,000 a month, reliably, with no margin for fluctuation. That is not a bridge. That is a cliff.

On top of that, the system keeps them under constant pressure. There is paperwork, reviews, meetings, deadlines, and punitive rules.

My friend must prove over and over that they are still disabled, unable to support themselves, and still deserving of food. Every year, they must restate their own incapacity in writing.

The cruel irony is that they are too disabled to complete the paperwork on time. So it is late. And when SNAP paperwork is late, benefits are cut for a month or two. No food. More stress. More pain. Less clarity. Then the next round becomes even harder.

This is not a personal failure. This is how human systems respond to threat.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology perspective, the body does not distinguish between past danger and present structural danger. Uncertainty, surveillance, and the risk of sudden loss all activate the same protective responses that once kept a child alive. Attention narrows, energy collapses, decision-making becomes harder, and time feels distorted. This happens when safety is conditional.

These “support” systems demand regulation while continuously removing the conditions that make it possible.

They also force a devastating identity bind. To survive, a person must repeatedly declare themselves incapable. Any sign of progress becomes a liability. A fluctuation becomes suspicious. The system teaches the body that improvement is dangerous and that stability depends on staying small. That undermines well-being at every level.

This is why people become trapped. It’s not due to lack of grit or insight, but because the structure itself keeps the nervous system in survival mode. You cannot build capacity while constantly bracing for loss. You cannot heal in a context that requires you to perform your own deprivation.

And yet, people do survive this. Not because the system works, but because humans find each other.

The real exits from these traps are rarely individual. They are relational: mutual aid, shared resources, people helping each other with paperwork, someone making sure you eat when benefits are cut, or holding your place in line when your body gives out. Someone saying, “I see what this is doing to you, and it’s not your fault.”

Community care reduces threat. Reduced threat restores capacity. Capacity allows choice to return.

That is not inspirational, but biological

When stress comes down, digestion improves. Sleep deepens. Pain eases. Thinking widens. Creativity returns. Not because someone “changed their mindset,” but because the environment finally stopped demanding constant self-erasure.

This is why the answer is not tougher eligibility rules or more hoops. And it is not better coping skills alone. The answer is building parallel structures of support that do not punish need, that do not vanish when paperwork is late, and that do not require people to prove their suffering to deserve food.

An Interpersonal Neurobiology revolution does not start in institutions. It starts when ordinary people understand that well-being is shaped between us. That regulation is relational. That survival systems can be replaced with care systems, one connection at a time.

If you are stuck in one of these systems, your exhaustion makes sense. Your delays make sense. Your anger makes sense. The fact that you are still here makes sense.

You are not failing the system. The system is failing human nervous systems.

And the more we name that together, the less power it has to keep people trapped.

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Creating My Own Justice: Art, Words, and the Nervous System

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

I keep talking about what happened to me because the lack of justice makes it impossible to “let it go,” as if that is even a thing. The psychiatric abuse and forced FGM surgery didn’t just happen; they continue to resonate in my mind and body every time I feel the impact of what was done, countless times a day. When I try to move past it, the system reminds me I can’t: the practitioners who harmed me are not held accountable, the institutions that protect them are silent, and the world at large doesn’t see the ongoing cost. 

The failure of justice is the reason I create justice where I can, through my own expression, which carries its own undeniable power and transforms my experience into something real, seen, and felt.

The non-consensual surgery was years ago, and while it was by far the worst violation, I’ve had many healthcare practitioner attempts to invalidate me. Very unfortunately, the most recent was with a midwife, the kind of practitioner I trusted with both of my pregnancies and births. The midwife’s inability to attune and meet me where I was caused me significant harm. As in too many prior encounters, responsibility is denied, and there is no attempt to repair. The midwife answered my email with excuses instead of an authentic apology. The director brushed me off. I’m left with no choice but to integrate this betrayal myself. My nervous system feels it, my body carries it, and I have to respond. 

The process involves ongoing integration in small bits. Each begins when I notice the signals, the emotional and physical echoes, and I do something that supports integration. I write. I post on Facebook. I sketch. I begin to paint a watercolor. I illustrate my lived experience so people can understand it, because otherwise it is invisible and impossible to explain.

This is where Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) comes in, even if I’m not thinking about it. Our nervous systems are built for connection. They need compassionate witnessing to integrate distressing experiences. When that witnessing isn’t available from the people who caused harm, or the systems that should protect us, the nervous system remains unsettled, frozen in a loop of stress, alertness, and planning. Expressing my experience through words and watercolors is how I give my own nervous system what it needs: acknowledgment, validation, and release. It’s how I repair a relational rupture with myself when relational repair from others isn’t possible.

Every sketch, watercolor, or blog post expresses what happened and what I need now. It’s me giving form to the pain, anger, and confusion. It’s me showing my experience to the world because otherwise it disappears into isolation. This is what it means to create accountability when no one else will: to be your own witness, to find your own compassion, and to offer your story so others can witness it, too.

Sharing my watercolors with my healthcare practitioners is especially powerful because it gives them access to the reality of my experience in a way words can’t. These images carry the impact of what I’ve lived through, and they appeal for acknowledgment where there is often avoidance or denial. When I show them my work, I’m not asking for permission or pity, but offering a direct, undeniable witness to my truth. It shifts the dynamic from one of passive being done unto into one of active recognition. It creates a space where my nervous system can feel seen and validated, even within the healthcare system that most often fails to provide for this need.

I don’t have the justice I want from the institutions that failed me. But I do have the ability to respond to what my body, nervous system, and mind need. I survive by continuing to be me, despite the pressure to shut up and go away, and that, in its own way, is a kind of justice, too.

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I Can’t Trust a Doctor Who Doesn’t Trust Me

Posted on January 12, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

I Can’t Trust a Doctor Who Doesn’t Trust Me

The biggest barrier to my health has been the practitioner’s refusal to trust me. They don’t believe what I say about my body, experience, or reality. They can’t take in what I need, know, or what I’ve been through. It’s exhausting.

I can’t trust them if they won’t trust me, if they dismiss my observations, ignore my methodically collected biodata, belittle my efforts, or treat me like a problem to manage instead of a person to collaborate with. If they can’t see, hear, and empathize with me, I can trust this: they will harm me.

In an honest, integrated doctor-patient relationship–one based on mutual respect and interpersonal neurobiology–trust flows both ways. When it doesn’t, when they refuse to meet me with curiosity and attunement, it makes it impossible for me to trust them.

When my provider disbelieves me, my nervous system reacts. It knows the rupture. It says, “This is not safe.” I can’t receive care, tolerate guidance, or co-regulate with them. Most often, I dissociate. This is one way my body protects me.

Everything I bring–my charts, studies, and self-awareness–is aimed at deep collaboration. I’m showing up fully. Are they?

I’m not being difficult or controlling. I’m doing the hard work of making healing possible.

If they can’t meet me there–if they insist on staying in power-over rather than relationship–I can trust one thing: disconnection in medicine is harm. Maybe not malicious, but real, measurable, damaging harm.

That clarity is hard-won through years of negative and positive experience. If a doctor can’t trust me, I have to say, “NEXT!” and move along.

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Nothing Left to Lose: How I Became Free Enough to Tell the Truth

Posted on January 9, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

I became an activist and artist because I was stripped of almost everything: health, stability, belonging, and safety. I had nothing left to lose.

I had worked so hard to do well in this toxic culture. I tried to go to college. Complex PTSD made it almost impossible to function well enough to stay in school, work, and keep housing stable at the same time. It took me four years to complete one year of courses.

So I built a life another way. I got married, raised two kids, and homeschooled them on a quarter-acre permaculture garden. Our lives were full of adventures and explorations. I gave much to my community: founded organizations, supported campaigns, rescued animals, and even changed county policy and state law.

But trauma shapes choices. I married someone I couldn’t stay married to. My teenagers began to ask, “When are we leaving?” So we left. Right before the housing bubble burst and the Great Recession began. I had a steeply underwater mortgage, no degree, 17 years out of the workforce, was over fifty, female, and living in government contractor land. All strikes against me.

I did what I always do. I worked like hell to keep things together. I taught the kids to drive, borrowed ladders to clean my gutters, and learned home repair because I couldn’t afford help. I became the general contractor for a whole-house replumb after multiple pinhole leaks in the copper pipes. I managed to land a county job with excellent benefits, but that disappeared after 2 years, when the boss gave my position to the relative of a political ally. I was unemployed for 14 months, then took the only job I could land, working for people I later learned were Greek Mafia. It was highly abusive, and my boss knew why I couldn’t leave.

When the kids were grown, and I’d submitted almost 400 job applications, I stopped pretending hard work would save me. I quit the life that was killing me and went to live the life I had dreamed of, sailing tall ships. It was almost all volunteer work, but I had a bunk, meals, the company of shipmates, and the sea. For the first time in years, I felt alive.

Then I settled in Delaware and gained mental health coverage for the first time. I thought help for recovery from lifelong Complex PTSD had finally arrived. Instead, that was the start of the worst seven years of my life, and counting.

The mental illness industry doesn’t see people. It processes them. I was treated like a number, a case file, a diagnosis. When Lexapro caused intense suicidal ideations, I was told that it couldn’t be real because it wasn’t in the textbooks. When the ideations became unbearable, I was sent to the cuckoo’s nest for an iatrogenic condition, harm caused by the system I had turned to for help. I came out in far worse condition than when I went in.

Seven months later, a surgeon performed non-consensual surgery on me, an act of deep bodily violation that still goes unpunished. Every institution I turned to for help protected him instead. The hospital, my insurance company, the licensing board, and the justice department closed ranks. My complaints to every agency went nowhere. He’s still harming vulnerable people, protected by the system that betrayed me.

And then the disease management industry blocked me from the care I needed to recover.

Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) reveals what this kind of chronic betrayal does to a person. A human nervous system can’t regulate in a culture built on domination and contempt. Safety and connection restore regulation, but the mental illness industry offers neither. It replaces relationship with protocol, curiosity with coercion, and care with control. When you’re already overloaded from trauma, this kind of systemic cruelty shatters what little stability you’ve managed to rebuild.

That’s what happened to me. The more I sought help, the deeper the betrayal cut. But there’s something the system doesn’t understand. When you’ve been kicked to the curb your whole life, you find different ways to operate. You stop begging for inclusion in a structure that’s never going to make room for you. You learn to see what’s really there.

I no longer have to protect anything that depends on my silence. I don’t have a job to lose, can’t compete for employment, do not need a professional appearance, have no dependents to support, or motivation to climb. They already took all that. What’s left is clarity.

This culture rewards compliance and calls it health. It punishes dissent and calls it disorder. But when they’ve taken everything they can take, and you’re still standing, you gain the freedom to tell the truth about what this system really is: a machine built to maintain hierarchy by breaking human beings. When you stop trying to survive by their rules, you become dangerous.

Now I use that clarity as fuel. I’m an activist and artist exposing the systems and structures that cause nearly all human suffering. I teach people how betrayal, neglect, and hierarchy overload the nervous system, and how connection, autonomy, and real community restore it. I do this because I’ve lived what happens when the world’s “help” betrays you at every turn. I can’t change the past, but I can show others how to survive, how to reclaim life force, and how to see clearly enough to build a culture that actually supports human thriving instead of exploiting us to death.

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The DSM Misses the Mark: IPNB Offers a Humane and Scientific Understanding of Mental Health

Posted on January 7, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Some trauma experts have said that if the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) acknowledged trauma, it would be a very thin volume because virtually everything else would fall beneath it. But from an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, the DSM is irrelevant. A categorical, symptom-based system, it separates people into boxes and treats distress as pathology. IPNB sees humans as relational, neurophysiological systems shaped by context, connection, and experience. What looks like “disorder” is often a survival adaptation to overwhelming environments, chronic stress, or disrupted relationships.

If IPNB principles were the foundation, there wouldn’t be a manual of fixed categories. Instead, the focus would be on mapping how a person’s nervous system is functioning, how their relationships and communities support or sabotage regulation, and where overload or chronic threat is causing symptoms. Instead of labeling people, diagnosis would be about understanding context, connection, and neurophysiological patterns.

Dynamic, relational assessments of the health of internal and external systems would replace the DSM. Everything the DSM tries to name as “illness” would instead be seen as a signal that a system is under chronic strain. An IPNB-informed alternative to the DSM might look like:

No Static Categories, Only Relational Patterns

Instead of labeling people with fixed disorders, it would map patterns of nervous system response across different contexts—threat detection, connection, regulation, and recovery. A “diagnosis” wouldn’t be a label on a person; it would describe how their system is managing stress, connection, and homeostasis.

Distress As A Signal, Not A Pathology

Every symptom—anxiety, depression, pain, insomnia, dissociation—would be seen as information about the nervous system and relational environment. These are adaptive responses to chronic stress, trauma, neglect, or abusive hierarchies, not evidence of “brokenness.”

Emphasis on Developmental and Ongoing Trauma

Instead of isolating traumatic events, it would recognize cumulative relational stress across the lifespan. The system would map how early experiences, caregiving environments, and ongoing societal pressures shape nervous system patterns. Most “disorders” would simply fall under this umbrella.

Systems-Level Assessment

The focus would include family, community, culture, and institutions. How connected is the person? How much support do they actually receive? How safe are their environments? These factors would be central because they directly shape nervous system regulation.

Dynamic, Context-Sensitive Framework

Assessments would be fluid, constantly updated with ongoing observations of physiological state, relational interactions, and environmental demands. It would account for recovery, regression, and adaptation over time, rather than treating symptoms as static.

Intervention Targets

Rather than prescribing medication or therapy based on a label, interventions would aim to:

 Reduce chronic threat load

Repair and strengthen relationships and community

Enhance nervous system regulation capacity

Address environmental and structural sources of stress

Education and Prevention as Key

Instead of a manual for diagnosing pathology, it would be a framework for understanding human adaptation, preventing overload, and fostering connection. Everyone’s nervous system could be “mapped” and supported before distress becomes severe.

Several notable organizations have expressed significant opposition to the DSM-5, the current edition: the British Psychological Society, American Counseling Association, Society for Humanistic Psychology (APA Division 32), 

Society for Community Research and Action: Division of Community Psychology (APA Division 27), Society for Group Psychology & Psychotherapy (APA Division 49), UK Council for Psychotherapy, the Association for Women in Psychology, Constructivist Psychology Network, and the Society of Indian Psychologists. Reasons for opposition include lack of scientific basis (not based on objective biological markers but on clinical consensus), clinical unusefulness (does not accurately reflect clinical reality and that some diagnoses are overly broad or poorly defined), and its focus on symptoms vs. underlying causes.

The DSM under IPNB wouldn’t exist because its foundation–categorical labeling of people based on symptom clusters–is fundamentally misaligned with how humans function. We would have a relational, neurophysiological map of adaptation and stress, not a book that labels and pathologizes them. In my view, given its irrelevance, coupled with its history of driving deep and widespread harm, the DSM should be banished now. 

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When Your Partner Cannot or Refuses to Understand Trauma

Posted on January 5, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

One of the most destabilizing dynamics for a trauma-impacted nervous system is not the original harm. It is ongoing misattunement inside an intimate relationship.

When a partner cannot or refuses to understand trauma, the problem is not a lack of information. It is a relational failure.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, trauma is not a story someone tells. It is a state the body organizes around when safety has been repeatedly violated. That organization shapes perception, reactivity, capacity for trust, and tolerance for closeness. It is not optional. It is not a mindset issue. It is not something a partner can override by insisting on normalcy.

When a partner dismisses, minimizes, intellectualizes, or reframes trauma as overreaction, they are not neutral. They are introducing threat into the relationship. And nervous systems track threat far more reliably than words.

What Is Actually Happening
A partner who refuses to understand trauma often does one or more of the following:  prioritize their comfort over your safety, demand explanations instead of offering curiosity, frame your responses as character flaws or bad habits, interpret your limits as rejection, or expect you to self-regulate in conditions that remain unsafe. These are dominance moves, conscious or not.

From an IPNB lens, connection requires mutual regulation. That means both people adjust in response to impact. When only one person is expected to adapt, the relationship becomes hierarchical. Hierarchy drives stress. Stress drives symptoms. The system stays overloaded.

You cannot heal in an environment that keeps asking your nervous system to perform against its own survival cues.

Stop Trying to Make Them Understand
This is hard to acknowledge, but it is important. If someone has been given clear information about trauma and continues to dismiss its impact, more explaining will not create safety. It will create further exposure.

Education only works when curiosity exists. Without curiosity, education becomes self-betrayal. Your nervous system does not need their agreement to be valid. It needs predictability, responsiveness, and respect for limits.

What You Can Do Instead
First, orient to reality. Ask yourself one clear question, “Does my partner change their behavior when I name impact?” Not their words, or intentions, but behavior.

If the answer is no, then your task shifts. It is no longer about being understood. It is about reducing harm. That may look like naming boundaries without debate, reducing emotional exposure, stopping attempts to co-regulate with someone who escalates you, building external sources of safety and resonance, or letting go of the fantasy that love alone creates capacity. This is not punitive, but protective.

IPNB is clear on this point. Regulation emerges in conditions of safety. Safety is not created by insisting someone tolerate what hurts them. It is created by adjusting the environment.

About Staying or Leaving
People often ask whether they should stay with a partner who cannot understand trauma. That is not an abstract moral question, but a physiological one.

If your body is chronically bracing, collapsing, or mobilizing around your partner, then the relationship itself is adding load. Over time, systems under load degrade. That includes immune function, digestion, sleep, and relational capacity.

Staying requires real change. Not promises. Not insight. Change you can feel. Leaving is not failure. It is sometimes the first act of regulation a person has ever been allowed to make.

The Bottom Line
Trauma recovery does not happen through persuasion, but through safety. A partner does not need to fully understand trauma theory to be safe. They need to respect the impact, adjust their behavior, and relinquish dominance.

If they cannot or will not do that, the work becomes yours. Not to fix yourself or the relationship, but to protect your nervous system from further harm. That is not selfish, but biology.

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