In the year 2000, I was diagnosed with PTSD, which confused me because I was not a war veteran, nor a train crash survivor. As a civilian man, with no history of a catastrophic, near-death-experience to tie my PTSD to, I was a rare case. I welcomed the diagnosis because it brought the promise of healing. Up to then, no other medical or psychological treatment had made a dent in my sleep disorders, anxiety, depression, addiction, dissociative trances, time losses, poor self-image, chronic suicidality, and countless physical problems due to armoring.

In fact, after I finally accepted the severity of my childhood traumas, I shared my personal life’s story with a friend who’d been diagnosed with PTSD from his battlefield experiences. I was floored to hear him reply with, “My friends and I (with combat PTSD) don’t respect people like you who claim to have PTSD but didn’t see the horrors we saw.” Utterly invalidated and humiliated, I spent the next few days stunned and, once again questioning my right to call myself a PTSD survivor. Around that same time, I was politely asked to leave a PTSD presentation when the speaker introduced herself to me and found out I had never been in the military.

I guess my trauma wasn’t really as bad as other people with PTSD. Was it?

Well, obviously it was indeed that bad, otherwise why had I experienced three suicide attempts before my 21st birthday? People don’t use suicide to escape life, they use it to escape intolerable pain. If my lifetime of near-intolerable pain from childhood abuse wasn’t due to PTSD, then what was it tied to?

If it were any other injury, like a broken leg for example, does a broken leg in battle deserve better medical attention than the same broken leg from falling down a staircase?

 A New Diagnosis: Complex-PTSD

My friend’s disrespect for my lifetime of soul-crushing pain triggered a few days of self-doubt. After all, being invalidated and blamed for my own misery is part-and-parcel of what caused my lifetime of shame and self-doubt in the first place, so I guess I was used to being humiliated for having PTSD. All my symptoms, many far more debilitating than his, were still there, so yeah, I still had a formidable case of PTSD regardless of his macho opinion that he was winning some sort of a competition with me for trauma severity.

Recently, the World Health Organization added Complex PTSD as a distinct diagnosis to its International Classification of Diseases.  This has helped to demystify life for people like myself, who experience the symptoms of PTSD but have no train crash or battlefield to tie it to. According to the WHO, all three symptoms of PTSD are present in trauma survivors with Complex-PTSD, plus three others, making the validity and severity of my diagnosis more understandable. My war veteran friend ducks when he hears fireworks, well, so do I. My Fight-or-Flight response is turned up to high just like his is. But in addition to his PTSD symptoms of avoidance, hypervigilance and re-experiencing, I have three more, and according to the WHO, I now understand that I also suffer with a lifelong, unrelentingly poor self-image which have been identified as:

Unique Symptoms - The following three symptoms involve interpersonal threats to the psychological self, resulting in disturbances to self-organization (DSO) including harm, disintegration, or death of the self:

• AD – Affective Dysregulation (shame, fear, anger/rage, grief; hypoarousal - numbing, dissociation, depersonalization, derealization)

• NSC – Negative Self-Concept (highly critical of self; feeling defective/inferior/worthless; perfectionism)

• DR – Disturbed Relationships (attachment disorder, social anxiety, desire to isolate, feeling different than others, mistrust, fear of vulnerability or intimacy)

These are the sympyoms which have added to the complexity of traditional PTSD and why it is now considered a distinct diagnosis.

 In Laymen’s Terms, How PTSD Compares to Complex-PTSD

PTSD is easy to understand. It goes like this: One day there was a crash with sounds and smells and sensations. From then on, anytime those sounds, smells or sensations appear in daily life, the survivor is triggered to relive the crash. The reaction to grab the seats or scream, even decades afterward is easy to understand. Often, in PTSD—and this is important—the survivor has a reference point around the day the trauma changed them. The survivor remembers who they were prior to the crash or war. They know who they once were, what happened, and how it changed them.

Complex-PTSD means that the trauma was not a single event. The triggers are complex and sometimes difficult to identify. And our trauma-reactions are just as complex and don’t make sense to us. We weren’t in a war. We weren’t in a crash. We may have been sexually and/or physically abused on an ongoing basis or the abuse may have been more subtle. I, myself, was covertly trained (gaslighted) from birth by trusted family and peers, over a long period of time, to distrust and hate myself for a laundry list of various reasons. I was a mess and didn’t know why. Complex-PTSD may drive all the same symptoms as PTSD, but for most survivors of childhood abuse or neglect, we may not realize we even have it. For me, I just assumed I was born broken, which led to a life with hopelessly damaged self-image.

 The First Hurdle is Accepting the Diagnosis and its Severity

I needed convincing that my childhood was more traumatizing than I’d believed. I know this is common in others because people often say to me “My childhood wasn’t as bad as yours” but then they start to disclose stories of abuse that send shivers down my spine. It seems common that a lot of us can’t easily accept that our lives were as abusive as they were.

As for me, healing didn’t begin to move at a good pace until I fully accepted the severity of the overt and covert bullying I’d lived through as a child and young adult.

For many fellow Complex-PTSD survivors and I, accepting the severity of our childhood traumas takes time. Many of us grew up in toxic households, but we didn’t comprehend just how toxic they really were. We want to believe it wasn’t so bad, so we run with that belief.

The brain’s gift of adaptability threw us a curve ball. Part of our human survival instinct is to accept the world we live in, brush the dust off, stand up tall, adapt, and try to move forward stronger and better. We minimized our abuse and adapted to the bad information we’d once been given about who we are.

Knowledge is Power: Acceptance Begins Healing

I’ve been living with Complex-PTSD my entire life. My childhood was filled with severe mob-bullying, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and an unsupportive, dishonest family. I became suicidal at twelve but didn’t know why. Before receiving the PTSD diagnosis in 2000 I believed I was born broken and had too many unrelated health problems to deal with. I was the embodiment of self-loathing shame. But one day I learned that most of my mental and physical health problems were symptoms of just one thing: Complex-PTSD.

The good news is that the sun is now shining welcome light onto the dark complexity of complex trauma. Books and blogs and podcasts and therapists are exploding onto the global scene, dedicated solely to helping people like myself who, until recently, were destined to live in the shame of just believing we were inexplicably broken. This relatively new information about Complex-PTSD has demystified for me the “how and when” of my original trauma and has lit a new path of healing and self-acceptance for me to follow.

But most importantly, I’ve stopped comparing myself to other Complex-PTSD survivors, and I’ve stopped brushing off the severity of the traumas I have experienced. By my laundry list of symptoms and suicidal behaviors, I know that my trauma has nearly cost me my life, many times. So yeah, it was bad, and I need to accept and respect that severity if I’m going to heal from it.

It turns out that for myself and many of the survivors I talk with, our childhoods really were that bad. And I, we, really do deserve to receive treatment and respect for surviving something a great many people throughout history did not survive.

Reference

World Health Organization. (2018). ICD-11: International Classification of Diseases 11th Revision. https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en#/http%253a%252f%252fid.who.int%252ficd%252fentity%252f585833559

About the author: James F Johnson is a relational trauma survivor, member of Out of the Storm, and author of the series, Bullies & Allies which he wrote to shine a light on Complex PTSD. The series includes Disaster Island, The Goat Driver and The Puzzled. 

Web site: http://www.jamesfjohnson.com/home.html   Blog: www.jamesfjohnsonblog.com