Sunday 24 December 2017

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Road to Recovery

a post by Liz Lazzara for the World of Psychology blog

Persistent neglect in childhood can lead you to believe that you don’t deserve to be loved or cared for. This idea begins to define you: you are a person who ought to be treated badly.

When we think of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a specific list comes to mind: soldiers returning from combat zones and police officers connected to terrible incidents in the line of duty; victims of sexual trauma and women who were beaten by their partners; the families who stood on the roofs of their houses in the aftermath of Katrina and those who managed to walk away from the horrific South Asian tsunami in 2004. We are right to think of these people and to recognize their experiences, but there are many others living with an equally damaging — yet much more invisible — condition: complex post-traumatic stress disorder or C-PTSD.

The psychological community credits Judith Herman as the originator of this diagnosis. She first described C-PTSD in her book 1992 book, Trauma and Recovery, complementing the diagnosis of PTSD that had been added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 12 years earlier, noting that trauma-related disorders weren’t only the result of one intense, acute crisis, but also through chronic, subtler experiences of pain.

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