Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD Symptoms & Causes

However, survivors harbor the fear that borders on terror all day and all night without a break. Unfortunately, this need to rescue or be rescued often leads to situations where the survivor lives in unhealthy relationships where they are not safe. For these people, life is a series of either being rescued or rescuing others leading to a life full of confusion and self-loathing as neither position is conducive to a great relationship with someone else. The reality is that victims of trauma were not responsible for what happened to them, nor were they responsible for the safety of other victims. The people to whom those responsibilities fall are the people who harmed them.

Post-traumatic stress disorder and declarative memory functioning: a review

• Researchers have established multiple neurobiological systems and structural and functional abnormalities involved in PTSD.31-32 Here, key systems and structures and their relationship to declarative memory will be briefly summarized.
• While these experiences may be scary in the moment, you can control and even prevent them with the right treatment plan.
• Survivors sometimes have a horrific time of being both autonomous and in healthy relationships as many will seek to be rescued or become one themselves.
• Before treatment begins, your healthcare provider will ask questions to determine if you are currently in an unsafe situation that contributes to your symptoms.
• The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) also provides a list of therapists who treat trauma and dissociation, along with other resources.
• If this is a medical emergency or if there is immediate danger of harm, call 911 and explain that you need support for a mental health crisis.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, coined the term “conversion hysteria” highlighting the emergence of physical symptoms as an attempt to resolve or to communicate unconscious and unbearable psychic conflicts, often of sexual origin (psychic conflicts “converted” into physical symptoms). If you would like some extra support with complex PTSD dissociation and are looking for a psychotherapist, please contact me for a free 30-minute consultation to learn about how I can be of service. With help, you can move ahead, freer and lighter, without leaving parts of yourself in the dark. Think of this experience as a  significant feeling of detachment from your body. Some people even feel completely alienated from it, unable to recognize their own hands or face.

Symptoms of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD)

For example, they may diagnose a person with borderline personality disorder (BPD) due to this condition’s close relationship with a history of trauma. Social inequities and inconsistent access to health insurance and treatment also mean that people from marginalized groups may not get adequate access to proper mental health treatment, potentially making complex ptsd blackouts trauma-related symptoms worse. Often, people with complex PTSD have experienced prolonged trauma such as ongoing physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. Traditional PTSD will affect nearly 7% of people in the U.S. at some point in their lives. Symptoms may result from changes in regions of the brain that deal with emotion, memory, and reasoning.

My Parting Words on the Symptoms of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Instead, distinctive activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a brain region specifically activated by the internal generation (i.e. ‘choice’) of action, was observed between groups, suggesting that patients with conversion weakness were not simply faking their symptoms. Chronic abuse, can be re-experienced again and again in your mind, stressing your brain and body. C-PTSD, is a highly cryptic form of PTSD because the triggers are not always clear. It may result if your brain has been trained for such long periods to operate on fear, constantly attuned to the traumatic patterns you endured.

More on Mental Health

Only after working hard with a therapist do people living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder begin to understand, at least on the surface, that they are not damaged goods. If the symptoms last weeks or longer, and if they disrupt your life, you may have PTSD. See a trained mental health professional if you’re worried that you might have PTSD. Learn how to find affordable mental health care, connect with a culturally competent therapist, or search for a therapist who has experience treating trauma and PTSD.

More studies are needed to investigate the biological basis of complex PTSD as a clinical entity and its differences from trauma-induced disorders such as PTSD. It is important, to establish that any memory deficits observed in patients with PTSD are related to PTSD and not to psychiatric conditions commonly comorbid with PTSD, particularly depression, substance use disorders, and traumatic brain injury. For example, Neylan et al20 failed to find PTSD-related memory deficits when veterans with psychiatric comorbidities were excluded. Barrett et al30 found that veterans with PTSD alone did not exhibit impairments in neurocognitive functioning, whereas veterans with PTSD and a concurrent, diagnosis of depression, anxiety, or substance abuse did. To further address the comorbidity issue, researchers have matched PTSD and control subjects on comorbidity status,2, 11, 12 statistically controlled for alcohol use or depression,6 or examined subgroups with and without comorbid disorders8 and continued to find PTSD-related neuropsychological deficits.

What Are the Symptoms of CPTSD?

Next time you experience an episode, revisit what you were feeling and thinking just before the flashback or dissociation occurred. The more ​early warning signs you can come up with, the better able you will be to prevent future episodes. Similar to flashbacks, dissociation may range from temporarily losing touch with things that are going on around you, kind of like what happens when you daydream, to having no memories for a prolonged period of time and/or feeling as though you are outside of your body. Subsequent neuroimaging studies in patients with CD/FND have consistently identified a hyperactive amygdala to emotional stimuli and an increased coupling to supplementary motor area (SMA) 25,26,27.

How the Symptoms of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are Treated

The second framework posits that preexisting memory deficits serve as a risk factor for the development of PTSD following trauma exposure. Each model represents either end of the nature vs nurture paradigm – either that the environment impacts neurobiology or that, genetics influence one’s predisposition to PTSD. If you’re living with the aftereffects of trauma, you might notice a slow, sluggish mental state known as brain fog getting in the way of your personal or work life. If you sometimes lack mental clarity and feel fatigued, you may be experiencing PTSD-related brain fog.

What Connects C-PTSD and Memory Loss?