Maybe your body never fully powers down, always braced for something even when nothing is wrong, and calm feels like a stranger. Maybe closeness carries a quiet risk you cannot name. A Complex PTSD Evaluation in Monona, WI helps you understand where that constant guardedness came from and what it is asking for, with unhurried care. No referral is needed to begin.
Each evaluation begins by mapping how you think, focus, and regulate under stress, then layers in trauma focused and emotional measures shaped around your story. One licensed psychologist stays with the whole process, moving at a pace your nervous system can tolerate and watching along the way for the conditions that often travel with complex trauma.
In children, the aim is to understand the toll of ongoing stress or adversity with patience, not to hurry toward a label. The focus stays on what helps a child feel safe, what settles them, and where their sense of security has been shaken.
In teens, watch for emotions that swing to extremes, a harsh or shifting sense of who they are, and real difficulty trusting or letting people close. Reactions that look like too much often make complete sense once you know what they have carried.
In adults, it can show up as a background hum of feeling unsafe, quick and overwhelming emotion, and a pull to keep people at arm’s length. Shame or a sense of not being enough runs underneath, and the effects reach into work, love, and daily life.
Your evaluation opens with about an hour of conversation, where your psychologist gathers a careful personal history in a setting built to feel safe. Because complex trauma usually grows out of experiences that went on for a long time, this covers a wider timeline, tracing how those years shaped your emotions, your relationships, and how you see yourself. You set the pace throughout.
From there your psychologist assembles a battery matched to the layered effects of complex trauma. Testing typically runs 2 to 6 hours across one or two days, and you head home with self report questionnaires; someone close to you can complete their own if they choose. If signs of anxiety, depression, dissociation, or ADHD surface, those are screened as well.
All of it, from test data to clinical observations to questionnaire results, is compiled into a detailed diagnostic report. Your psychologist looks at how complex trauma has touched emotion regulation, identity, relationships, and thinking, and documents anything co occurring so the picture is complete.
Roughly two to three weeks later you return for a feedback session. Your psychologist walks you through the findings and lays out recommendations made for you: specialized trauma therapy options, emotion regulation strategies, relationship support, and grounded next steps for your own healing.
No. A referral is never required to be seen at Core Spring Diagnostics. You can reach out directly, whenever you feel ready and for any reason.
Complex PTSD usually grows from prolonged or repeated trauma and reaches into self image, emotion regulation, and relationships, while PTSD more often follows a single event. The evaluation clarifies which picture fits you.
A gentle, trauma informed interview, a cognitive and executive function baseline, trauma focused and emotional measures, and screening for related concerns, all with one psychologist at a pace that respects your history.
Yes. We work with teens and adults, and with younger clients we move slowly and gently around trauma related patterns.
A clear, jargon free report, plus a feedback session where individualized and trauma informed recommendations point you toward steadier ground.
Call our Madison office at (608) 396 4830 and we will find a time that works for you. There is no referral to arrange first.
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