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Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric condition that can result from a person’s exposure to a single traumatic event. The more severe complex PTSD is a long-term condition that results from experiencing prolonged trauma, over which the person has little or no control, and from which escape seems hopeless. Many times, complex PTSD affects those who suffered ongoing physical, emotional, or sexual abuse during childhood and victims of long-term domestic violence.
Complex PTSD can cause people to feel like their emotions are out of control like they may have a breakdown at any moment. They often feel unloved and unworthy of positive feelings from others toward themselves–that they can never be good enough. They may have feelings of being overwhelmed like they cannot possibly handle even one more thing. Additionally, they may feel like they are just waiting for the “other shoe to drop,” even when things are going well.
Other common characteristics include:
- Rage: This can be turned inward causing things like eating disorders, substance abuse,depression, promiscuity, and codependence; or turned outward causing violence, destruction of property, and being overly controlling.
- Avoidance: A person with complex PTSD may withdraw from relationships with others to lessen the chances of rejection, criticism, and exposure.
- Catastrophizing: This is the practice of assuming the worst case scenario and feeling like even the most minor problems are catastrophic events.
- Denial: A person may believe that a traumatic event or memory didn’t happen, when in fact, it did.
- Dependency: This it the reliance on someone else for a person’s own personal and emotional well-being.
- Fear of Abandonment: This can be the unsubstantiated feeling that one is in danger of being rejected or replaced.
- Hypervigilance in relationships: This manifests when a person maintains an unhealthy level of interest in the behaviors, comments, and thoughts of others.
- Learned helplessness: This happens when someone believes that they have no control over a situation, even when they do.
- Low self-esteem: This is when a person has a self-perception which is negative and inconsistent with reality.
- Self-loathing: This is an extreme hatred of one’s self.