Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder/Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

PTSD

If you have experienced or witnessed a life-threatening situation such as an assault, a tragedy, a car accident, an abusive relationship or an abusive parent you have likely suffered from some degree of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Symptoms of trauma include:

• Flashbacks
• Intrusive Memories
• Avoidance behavior
• Feeling easily overwhelmed or agitated
• Sleep difficulties
• Physical restlessness
• Feeling stuck in old patterns

Trauma can take the form of capital “T” trauma as in an assault, or it can take the form of little “t” trauma from the smaller insults of daily living. Either way, when we feel threatened we store the experience in a heightened state and that experience becomes stuck. Traumatic memories then become buried in the unconscious only to be triggered later in life by a host of factors, including anniversary dates, similar words, actions, looks, sounds, or feelings. When traumatic memories are triggered, we may or may consciously recall the old memory, but we find ourselves responding in old stuck patterns.

C-PTSD

The genesis of Complex PTSD is most often associated with extended periods of ongoing physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood. In dysfunctional families, many parents disdain children for needing so much attention from them, and react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment.

Contempt can sometimes be more traumatizing than physical abuse. It is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of rage and disgust. Rage creates fear and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches him/her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention, and before long from seeking any kind of help or connection at all. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt.

Complex PTSD: Emotional Abuse or Neglect

Complex PTSD can also be caused by emotional neglect alone; (emotional neglect also typically occurs in most situations of prolonged contempt and physical abuse). Parents who systematically ignore or turn their backs on a child’s calls for attention, connection or help, abandon their child to unmanageable amounts of fear which over time devolve into the child giving up and succumbing to depressed, death-like feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. These types of rejection simultaneously magnify the child’s fear, and eventually add a veneer of shame to it.

Moreover, to the duration and degree that emotional abandonment takes place and to the degree that there is no alternative adult (relative, older sibling, neighbor, teacher) to turn to for comfort and protection, to that degree does the PTSD set in, and to that degree can a myriad of triggers (external or internal) activate the individual into flashing back into the painful emotional and toxic cognitive conditions of childhood. This is especially true when the abandonment occurs 24/7, 365 days a year for the first few years. -Pete Walker MA, MFT

Our PTSD Therapists in Kirkland Are Here to Help

Whether you are experiencing PTSD/C-PTSD or have suffered from it, please know you are not alone and do not have to suffer. We are here to help you and can walk you through healing and restoration. Trauma does not have to be the defining moment(s) of your life.