Welcome to the narcissistic abuse recovery podcast. I'm Caroline Stawson and I'll be sharing with you

awareness, understanding and education about the devastating effects of narcissistic abuse to help you thrive.

I want you to know that I've been exactly where you are now and I believe you.

And this show is all about taking you from trauma to transformation.

So in this episode, I want to talk to you about the four trauma responses when we talk about

narcissistic abuse. Now, there's a couple of things

in that sentence that you might be thinking, well, is narcissistic abuse trauma? Do we respond to it

in a trauma response? And the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It really, really is. Narcissistic

abuse is trauma. And remember,

trauma is any overwhelmed to our capacity to cope. And that could be absolutely major,

major things that we would normally associate with trauma, you know, that soldier that's out

in the war zone, being in a car crash. But narcissistic abuse

is a really insidious form of psychological abuse. And pretty much every single client that I see

exhibits all the signs and symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, when we talk about

trauma and how our nervous system reacts to this,

because it's actually our autonomic nervous system that really tells the story of our reactions

to everyday life. And that everyday life includes if you are in contact with a narcissist.

Now, many of you will probably have heard of fight,

flight and freeze. And I'm going to break those down for you in a moment too. But there's also a

fourth one, a lesser known one that we use when we're talking about narcissistic abuse,

or indeed any form of domestic abuse or child abuse. And that's fawn for a piece. So let me go

through each of these four and see if you can resonate with any of them because a lot of us think

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