Complext PTSD - Is This You?
What Is Complex PTSD?
This occurs when lots of aspects of you trauma reactions get mixed up and begin to create their own trauma. Major incidents usually have more than one traumatic moment. Most Ufton Nervet survivors can identify several moments of overwhelming threat to life even before they got off the train and others followed during their rescue, treatment in hospital, return home and with the reactions of others at home and work. The compensation process seems to be one trauma after another and some forms of coping create their own mini-traumas or stop the first one being healed.
This diagram may help you decide if your reactions have become a post-trauma disorder of the complex kind. If you look at the spiral model and feel you are firmly in the 'whirlpool' of the downward spiral this is another indication of complexity. Alternatively do you recognise yourself in any of these statements:
- You can't control emotional reactions, especially anger.
- When faced with a reminder of the trauma, you switch off, depersonalise it, feel spaced out, blank out.
- You are pre-occupied with every detail of the trauma and bore yourself and others by talking about it endlessly or turning every conversation to trauma talk.
- You always feel helpless, shame, blamed or to blame, alone or special.
- You cannot separate yourself from the perpetrator, for example by anger, the need for revenge or thinking about them endlessly.
- You find relating to other people difficult because you don't trust them, you don't trust yourself not to overwhelm them with emotions or your talking, or you want them to make you better or to be dependent on you. You either withdraw, avoid or get sucked into unhealthy relationships.
- You lose all sense of meaning, trust, hope and sense of control over your life.