C-PTSD: What Is It and Why Does It Happen?

The treatment of PTSD and C-PTSD is complex and depends on the individual. In this video, Dr. Victoria Chamorro at Priory Hospital in the UK discusses C-PTSD in short form. It's comprehensive but succinct, and I found it easy to understand.

Video run time 11:40

In the US, C-PTSD is not officially recognized in the DSM, the manual used to diagnose patients. Yet I see myself in the symptoms the more I learn about the pervasive nature of it.

My trauma is sexual abuse in childhood, so it meets the types of trauma that can develop into C-PTSD.

As described in the video, the reminders of my trauma affect every part of my life—subjects I can't talk about (even down to specific words or phrases that to anyone else are completely innocuous), movies and shows I can't watch, music I can't listen to, places I can't go, and on and on. 

Sleep is a huge problem for me. My trauma was ongoing, for a time on a nightly basis, and always occurred at bedtime. My distress in lying down to sleep is intense sometimes, and there are nights when I'm exhausted, but there's no chance of sleeping because every time I try to get comfortable, my abuser figuratively looms over me. In combination with ADHD and bipolar disorder, this means I commonly go without sleep for twenty to forty hours with little effect on my functioning, sometimes upward of sixty hours. It also means I have certain times of day that I cannot lay down to try to sleep; between nine p.m. and two a.m. are off limits for bedtime. My normal bedtime (or the goal anyway) is three a.m., which seems to work okay.

Flashbacks were a regular and distressing occurrence for about a decade, but it's been over seven years now because I have successfully explored my symptoms with biofeedback techniques. Now I know the sensations in my body when my emotional distress is ratcheting up and I need to calm down fast. There have been times that PTSD nightmares occurred at intense rates and frequencies. At one point eight or nine years ago, I was having nightmares about being sexually assaulted or watching other women be assaulted on a nightly basis. It was horrific. More nightmares meant more flashbacks, and more flashbacks meant more nightmares—a neverending downward spiral only halted by the use of Prazosin, a blood pressure medication with a side effect of essentially erasing any dreams from memory. With nightmares negated, the flashbacks eased significantly.

I've had mindfulness training and developed a long coping skills list useful for symptoms of PTSD, ADHD, and bipolar disorder. They help with stress as well as anxiety. The skills are mostly in the realm of distraction and grounding, two of the categories dividing up mindfulness strategies. For the former, a few examples are playing computer games, crafting and watching a movie, crafting and watching YouTube videos, reading, and blogging. For the latter, some examples are aromatherapy, putting on lotion to ground me in the present, drinking tea, baking, crafting (works for this, too), cleaning, cooking, and a big one is getting out in nature.

Some of this has become much more difficult with the onset of my physical limitations due to the FND (functional neurological disorder) symptoms. Nevertheless, I have a list printed out and stuck on the fridge with a magnet so if I need help and can't think of a way to do so, I can just walk up to that list and pick something to try.

All of my diagnoses swirl in a cacophony of symptoms, intertwining and crossing over to make diagnosis, management, and treatment more difficult for me and those treating me. There's a reason why my ADHD diagnosis came at forty-one years old.

These things are important to talk about. The more we discuss mental illness and the truth of living with different diagnoses, the less power stigma has over society.