Maybe you keep it all running, the job, the household, the calm face, while something underneath feels frayed and far from okay. When hardship stretches on for years, it can quietly reshape how you value yourself and how safe you feel with the people closest to you. A Complex PTSD evaluation in Middleton, WI helps you look at that honestly, and you do not need a referral to start.
We begin where every Core Spring evaluation begins, with a baseline of cognitive and executive function that grounds everything to come. Your psychologist then layers in trauma focused and emotional measures matched to what you have carried, and one licensed psychologist guides the entire process rather than passing you along. Since complex trauma often brings company, related concerns are screened for as part of the work.
With young children, the aim is understanding rather than labeling. We pay attention to how sustained stress or adversity is affecting a child day to day, and we look for the routines, relationships, and small comforts that already help them feel steadier and more secure.
In teens, the signs often include feelings that spike and crash, a shaky or self critical sense of identity, and a guardedness that makes closeness hard. Behavior that looks like too much on the surface usually fits, once you understand the history a teen is carrying underneath it.
For adults, it can show up as an ongoing sense of shame or worthlessness, emotions that feel impossible to manage, and difficulty trusting or staying close. A background hum of feeling unsafe is common, and its effects tend to spill into relationships, work, and ordinary days.
We open with roughly an hour of conversation in which your psychologist builds a full personal history inside a supportive, unpressured space. Because Complex PTSD generally comes from experiences that recurred over time, this discussion reaches across a wider timeline, exploring how those experiences shaped your emotional life, your relationships, and your sense of self. Nothing moves faster than you want it to.
Your psychologist then chooses a tailored set of assessments meant to capture the many layers complex trauma leaves behind. Testing usually spans 2 to 6 hours over one or two days, with take home questionnaires and the option for a trusted person to add their own perspective. Should signs of conditions like anxiety, depression, dissociation, or ADHD emerge, those are screened as well.
All of it, the scores, the observations, and the questionnaire responses, is woven into a detailed diagnostic report. Your psychologist examines how complex trauma has affected your emotion regulation, identity, relationships, and cognition, and any conditions found alongside it are fully written up so nothing important is left out.
About two to three weeks on, you come back for a feedback session. Your psychologist explains the diagnosis clearly and lays out recommendations made for you, whether that means specialized trauma therapy, tools for steadying emotions, support for your relationships, or the practical next steps that suit where you are in healing.
No, you never need a referral to be seen at Core Spring Diagnostics. Reaching out yourself is completely fine, whatever your reason for coming in.
Complex PTSD usually grows out of prolonged or repeated experiences and affects identity, emotion regulation, and relationships more broadly, whereas PTSD often points back to one event. Part of the evaluation is sorting out which one truly fits.
You can expect a trauma informed interview, a cognitive and executive function baseline, trauma focused and emotional measures, and screening for related concerns, all led by a single psychologist who moves at a pace that respects you.
Yes, teens and adults are both welcome, and with younger clients we handle trauma related patterns with extra gentleness and care.
A report written in plain language and a feedback session offering individualized, trauma informed recommendations, along with a clear path toward feeling better.
Reach our Madison office at (608) 396 4830 to arrange a time. You will not need a referral in hand; simply give us a call whenever you are ready.
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