CAUSES OF C-PTSD
I cannot stress how important it is to know and understand the inner-workings of you. This is the beginning of the healing process. The topic of the last EyeOnDV blog was what C-PTSD is. The next step is to uncover what the causes are. These will be the tools to identify what could be going on inside as a result of ongoing or chronic trauma. Being able to put names to experiences can help to empower and, possibly, expedite the healing process...I know it did for me! So, let’s jump in…
Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) is recognized as a separate condition (from PTSD) in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) although this is not yet the case in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). It is caused by repetitive and severe abuse over a long stretch of time...often occurring in childhood. The trauma experienced during this very impressionable period of life, unfortunately, most often has lifelong ramifications.
Exposure to this trauma can cause functional and structural changes in the brain, altering the volume and/or size of three particular sections: the amygdala (enlargement), which is the alarm center of the brain, the hippocampus (shrinkage), which is vital for memory, and the prefrontal cortex becomes hypoactive. These types of functional changes in the brain cause an ongoing overproduction of the stress hormone, cortisol, which over time wears down the immune system which, as you can imagine, has a catastrophic ripple effect throughout the body (i.e., the development of autoimmune diseases, etc.) if it is not handled and treated quickly. Examples of events that could cause this type damage are: exposure to domestic violence, genocide, child abuse/neglect/abandonment, torture, extreme poverty...to name a few. In all of these cases, the child/person is under the control of another person and cannot escape.
So, let’s take a particular hypothetical domestic violence case for example. There’s a couple and the wife is currently pregnant. The husband is abusive: physically, mentally, verbally, financially. The wife is under a constant cycle of abuse that she cannot, at this point, see her way clear of because she has been manipulated into becoming totally financially dependent on her partner, has been completely cut off from family, friends, and any support that she could have. She is spinning within the cycle of violence from honeymoon phase to tension to violence and so one, all the while trying to appease him and simply survive. Imagine the consistent stress her system is going through and at the most vital time in her and her unborn child’s lives. Remember, the child within her is experiencing everything she is experiencing and all her body is going through is making up the building blocks of this helpless child within her. This child is being hard-wired for abuse and having no defenses against it. It starts here. It starts at the very beginning of life when, during development, a child does not have the capability to say “no”. His/her brain is developing from a cellular level under the pressures that the mother’s brain is now being damaged by. The mother’s brain will have the capability to rewire itself and recover, if she manages to remove herself from the abuse, and is able to heal. But that is because her brain will have the memory of how it used to be prior to abuse to pull from. Her unborn child won’t have that luxury. He/she will have formed in toxicity...in catastrophic dysfunction.
So, do you see why it is so important to stop domestic violence in its tracks? We are literally cursing the next generation by implanting them with traumas that are our own and that they will be crippled by for life. It is our responsibility, MY responsibility, to make sure this stops...to make sure the C-PTSD no longer exists, especially as a result of domestic violence. I don’t know if I can accomplish that but I am certainly going to try.
Are you with me?