I came across a line recently that lodged itself in my head like a song lyric:

“The brain registers absence, not cause.”

At first, I thought, “Yeah, okay, sounds deep.” But the more I sat with it, the more it felt like someone had put words to a quiet truth I’d been carrying for years. Especially living with CPTSD.

As it turns out, our brains are designed to notice what’s missing. Safety. Comfort. A parent’s voice that should have been soothing but wasn’t. The hug that never came. The protection that should’ve been there and wasn’t.

The brain doesn’t ask why. It just encodes the absence.

And that absence becomes the raw material of CPTSD.

Absence Echoes Louder Than Presence

People often think trauma is about the bad things that happened. And yes, those moments leave scars. But with CPTSD, it’s just as much about the things that didn’t happen.

• No one rushing in when you were scared.
• No one telling you it wasn’t your fault.
• No one noticing your pain.

The brain doesn’t record a neat little footnote like, “Mom was emotionally unavailable because she was drowning in her own unresolved trauma.” Nope. It just notes the vacancy: no comfort here. You’re on your own.

This also explains why trusting people as an adult can feel so complicated. If absence was the norm, your nervous system is wired to expect it again. (I wrote more about that here: Why CPTSD Makes Trusting Others Tough).

The Survival Adaptation

When your brain registers absence over and over, it adapts. Hypervigilance becomes your radar system. You monitor every silence, every pause, and every person who doesn’t show up when they said they would.

Your nervous system whispers, “See?” People leave. People forget. Don’t count on them.

And so, adulthood becomes a tightrope walk between wanting connection and bracing for absence. Which explains why relationships can feel like a form of emotional CrossFit. (Spoiler: not a sport I’d recommend.)

Healing Means Teaching the Brain Cause

Here’s the hard, messy, beautiful part of recovery: learning to bring cause back into the picture.

• Therapy helps: You start naming the “why” behind the absences. Maybe your parent couldn’t show up because they never learned how. Maybe love was there, but in a form you couldn’t recognize. Maybe it really wasn’t about you at all.
• Self-compassion helps: You remind yourself: I wasn’t unworthy, I was unseen.
• New relationships help: Safe people start to fill in the gaps. Presence shows up where absence used to live.

Healing doesn’t mean rewriting the past. It means teaching your brain that absence isn’t the only story.

A Closing Thought

CPTSD recovery is often described as nonlinear, and that’s true, as I have talked about that a lot in this blog. But I think it’s also about shifting from absence to presence, from blank spaces to full sentences.

Yes, the brain registers absence first, but healing is about giving ourselves the cause, the context, and eventually, the compassion that was missing.

Because you deserved more than absence. You still do.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash