When you were born only two-thirds of your brain was developed. The aspects of the brain that give definition to the self were not developed at all. You had no sense of separation from your environment. All you could see, immediately when you were born, were the faces of those that held you (8-12 inches). For the first seven years (especially the first 3 years) you developed a sense of self that would shape your entire life going forward. We now know, through neuroscience, that during these years you were literally in a hypnotic or highly suggestible state and were being influenced on a deep level. Your sense of self is what determines how you see yourself, others, and the world, and what rules you feel about how you are “supposed” to interact with, think, and feel about yourself, others and the world, and the first seven years of your life you are being programmed by your environment and caregivers about this. Your family environment literally shaped the structure of your brain in your formative years, and so you might say that your identity and how you see yourself is an amalgamation of you internalizing how your family saw themselves and interacted with others. You were given subconscious rules to live by, directly and indirectly through your own inferences. Not all of them cause problems, but when they do they can lead to Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). Complex trauma is different than traditional PTSD in that there is'n’t a clear, single event that caused it; Instead, there are many subtle events that create the symptoms listed below, and often happening before an individual is self-aware or can develop explicit memory about it. Instead it is stored as implicit memory, which is the kind of memory that is unconscious and effects our lives without us consciously knowing it in many cases.