Healing Trauma Means Healing the Brain - What BDNF has to do with C-PTSD
By: Melissa Chana, MA, LPCC
“Why do I feel like this? I should be fine by now.”
I’ve heard that sentence in my therapy room more times than I can count. Clients who’ve been doing the work EMDR, inner child healing, boundaries, mindfulness and still find themselves panicking in the grocery store, snapping at their partner, or spiraling into shame after a small mistake.
Many of them have a dark voice in their head that whispers: You’re not trying hard enough. You’re just too sensitive. You’re broken.
Here’s the truth:
You are not broken.
Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was shaped to do. And part of that shaping starts in your genes long before the trauma ever happened.
Let’s talk about BDNF and why understanding it might change how you see your trauma (and your healing) forever.
Some Brains Are Born More Vulnerable, And That’s Not Your Fault
Meet “Sarah,” a 36-year-old woman I worked with (name changed). She came to me after years of on-and-off anxiety, digestive issues, and what she called “emotional whiplash.” She grew up in a chaotic, emotionally neglectful home. Nothing terrible happened, but she never felt safe. As an adult, even small stressors sent her into panic. Loud noises made her jump. Rejection crushed her. Meditation made her more anxious.
In therapy, we uncovered something powerful: Sarah wasn’t just responding to her past — her brain was wired to stay in threat mode.
Why?
Because Sarah, like many survivors of complex trauma, likely carried a genetic variant that reduced her BDNF a critical brain molecule that supports learning, emotional regulation, and recovery from stress. And in the presence of childhood trauma, that low BDNF created a kind of neurobiological trap.
What Is BDNF, and Why Should You Care?
BDNF stands for Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor. It’s basically miracle-grow for your brain. It helps neurons survive, connect, and rewire. It’s what allows you to:
Unlearn fear
Build new emotional habits
Regulate stress
Feel safe enough to try new things
If you don’t have enough BDNF or it’s being blocked by inflammation, poor nutrition, or chronic stress your brain literally can’t adapt the way others can. You might feel stuck, fragile, overly reactive, or numb. And no, it’s not just psychological.
Research shows that certain genetic variants, like the Val66Met polymorphism, reduce your brain’s ability to make and release BDNF especially under stress (Notaras et al., 2015). Trauma makes it worse. And if you experienced adversity early in life, you might also have epigenetic changes that silence BDNF production even further (Jovanovic et al., 2018).
That means:
It’s not just that trauma hurt you.
It’s that your brain wasn’t built to bounce back the way some others are.
What Low BDNF Feels Like in Real Life
You know how some people can get through a hard week and bounce back after a good night’s sleep?
Now imagine you can’t. You got a full 8 hours of sleep and uou wake up tired, foggy, and on edge, sad, even after resting consistently.
You might be living with low BDNF.
Here are a few signs I often see in clients with this profile:
You struggle to “unhook” from fear.
Something triggers you a text, a tone of voice, a noise and it sticks. Even hours later, your body is still buzzing. You can’t just “let it go.”
You can’t learn new emotional patterns.
Even after great therapy sessions, you find yourself back in the same emotional loops freezing, fawning, exploding, or shutting down.
Meditation and deep breathing make you feel worse.
Stillness isn’t relaxing, it’s threatening. You need stimulation to feel okay, but it burns you out.
You feel like your brain is “glitching.”
You forget things. You lose words. You stare at walls. You wonder if you have ADHD (maybe you do but trauma and low BDNF also affect focus and cognition).
You feel emotionally fragile.
Any change, even small, derails your day. A fight with a loved one can send you into a spiral for a week.
This isn’t weakness.
It’s biology.
Why Diet and Inflammation Make It Worse
Let’s take all that, and now add a modern inflammatory lifestyle refined sugar, alcohol, processed foods, fried foods, poor sleep, caffeine overdoses, and chronic stress.
Guess what those things do?
They suppress BDNF even more (Molteni et al., 2002; Rohleder & Karl, 2016).
If you already have a genetic or trauma-based disadvantage, these things pour gasoline on the fire.
Refined sugar leads to blood sugar crashes, brain fog, and inflammatory cytokines that choke off BDNF production.
Alcohol may feel like it helps you relax, but it disrupts sleep, spikes cortisol, and shuts down BDNF pathways (Bahi, 2017). It also mimics trauma in the brain, instability, chaos, up-and-down neurochemistry.
Food sensitivities and processed foods sneak in systemic inflammation that silently inflames the brain,creating more anxiety, more fatigue, more stuckness.
So if you’re someone with complex trauma, eliminating these foods isn’t “wellness” it’s nervous system medicine.
Movement That Heals, But Only If It’s Safe
Exercise is one of the best-known ways to increase BDNF (Szuhany et al., 2015). It boosts neuroplasticity, regulates mood, and enhances emotional resilience.
BUT - there’s a big catch.
For trauma survivors with a dysregulated nervous system, intense workouts can be a trigger. They mimic fight-or-flight. Heart pounding, breathless, sweating these sensations can reactivate old trauma. Emotions are stored in the body. Movement can release these emotions without our awareness. It’s not uncommon for clients to feel anxious, dizzy, or dissociated after spin classes or bootcamp-style workouts. Some clients depression, insomnia, or anxiety gets triggered instead of helped after a heavy workout.
Here’s what I recommend instead:
Gentle walking in nature
Slow yoga, especially breath-linked movement
Tai Chi or Qi Gong
Swimming with a focus on rhythm and breath
Low-impact strength training with controlled breathing
Dance or movement with emotion, not intensity
Start with movement that regulates, not overwhelms. Let your body know it’s safe to move, safe to feel, safe to exist.
You Can Heal, But You Need to Work With Your Biology
Here’s what I tell my clients who are navigating complex trauma and BDNF vulnerability:
This is not your fault. You may have inherited a nervous system that needed more support than it got. That’s not weakness. It’s neurobiology.
You’re not stuck forever. BDNF is modifiable. You can nourish it through food, movement, breath, nature, sleep, and relationship.
You need the right conditions. For you, healing is not a mindset it’s a metabolic and neurological process. If you don’t support the biology, the therapy will only go so far.
Your brain is not broken.
It is waiting to feel safe enough to grow.
And once that safety is in place, real, body-level, cellular safety, everything can change.
References (APA Style)
Bahi, A. (2017). Hippocampal BDNF overexpression or microinjection of BDNF protein enhances alcohol withdrawal-induced anxiety and BDNF levels. Scientific Reports, 7, 2828. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-03050-8
Jovanovic, T., Norrholm, S. D., Davis, J., Mercer, K. B., Almli, L. M., Nelson, A., ... & Ressler, K. J. (2018). PTSD is associated with BDNF epigenetic modification in trauma-exposed individuals. Translational Psychiatry, 8(1), 102. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-018-0122-3
Molteni, R., Barnard, R. J., Ying, Z., Roberts, C. K., & Gómez-Pinilla, F. (2002). A high-fat, refined sugar diet reduces hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor, neuronal plasticity, and learning. Neuroscience, 112(4), 803–814. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0306-4522(02)00123-9
Notaras, M., Hill, R., & van den Buuse, M. (2015). A role for the BDNF gene Val66Met polymorphism in schizophrenia? A comprehensive review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 51, 15–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2015.01.008
Rohleder, N., & Karl, A. (2016). Role of BDNF in the pathophysiology and treatment of PTSD and other stress-related disorders. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 70, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2016.04.014
Szuhany, K. L., Bugatti, M., & Otto, M. W. (2015). A meta-analytic review of the effects of exercise on brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 60, 56–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2014.10.003
