The Basics to Trauma and PTSD

PTSD, which stands for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, means that it is a set of experiences or reactions to a trauma that happened previously. It has an immediate onset, as result of something happened recently or experience the onset a few months later or even many years later. It isn’t so easy to determine, and recently there is a concept called Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) which isn’t even in the diagnostic statistical manual or the International Diagnostic Manual.

The diagnosis of PTSD is quite limiting, especially because there are a lot of people who still experience symptoms and the trauma is ongoing, which breaks away from post-trauma diagnosis. For experiences like sexual abuse, the trauma can be ongoing even after ten years, so there is no post-trauma because it is still ongoing. Even in the situations of refugees, the trauma continues, so the definition of post-traumatic stress is a bit limiting. Some of the ‘classic’ symptoms are: 

Nightmares: About the experience or something that links to the experience, like the 2015 earthquake;

Flashbacks: Even during the day, if you see something and it reminds you of the moment you experienced the earthquake or an accident, and you have a flashback of that moment. 
Sometimes it’s also hard to identify that it is linked to the event. Because of what you experienced, you might see something and then experience an anxiety or a stress reaction which is physical and shows symptoms like:Tightness of chest, Heavy Breathing, Sweating, Cold Hands.

You can experience these kinds of physical symptoms of stress without knowing why, and this can happen a lot. Little things can begin to trigger the stress reactions when you’ve had an experience of serious or continuous trauma. The triggers start becoming generalized, which makes it hard to determine what is triggering the anxiety, making it complex to describe 
and identity. 

The definition of a traumatic experience is also very limited. It was started as a post war diagnosis, so the first diagnosis of PTSD was done for soldiers when they came back from war. Once they knew that they had experienced trauma, the first symptoms and first diagnostic criteria were determined. Later as they began to diagnose people, it was realized that many people have been experiencing post-traumatic stress, and it’s not only the soldiers who went to war. For example, women who have experienced domestic violence or sexual harassment/assault or rape, would be experiencing post-traumatic stress but the focus had only been on the soldiers and the initial post-war stages. 
Now the idea of trauma is expanding and recognizes even childhood emotional neglect, which can also cause post-trauma type symptoms during adolescence or young adulthood. Plus, childhood emotional neglect is very large; it means we are not responding to a child’s emotional needs—that might mean that there is nothing physical or sexual but it can be something like demeaning or insulting the child, bullying the child, or if the child doesn’t live in an environment where they feel emotionally nourished—that can also cause post-traumatic stress. So it’s becoming very complex and it seems that everybody might have some link between childhood emotional neglect and anxiety during adulthood.

CPTSD

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) is diagnosed in people who have experienced continuous trauma, like children who’ve been in abusive situations all through their childhood,people who have been trafficked, and women who have experienced domestic violence over many years. 

They might experience more chronic reactions of stress like there is a constant feeling of being in danger. There is a constant feeling that something is going to happen or feeling a threat and it puts the body under a lot of stress. It is because the situations were real—if you experienced violence for long periods of time, you were living in an environment where threat was always present. So that reaction of your body helped you in that situation but later, even when you come to a safe space, it can still be there because the body has gotten so used to it.