What is C-PTSD
Two of the greatest challenges faced by a person with CPTSD is the inability to admit there is a need for help and the inability to ask for help. In general, life and the understanding of societal norms may become skewed or challenging. The reason being is that life has changed, but the person remains stagnant in time, making them feel alienated from the world as if they don’t belong. CPTSD promotes and reinforces a person’s everlasting survival mode even in the absence of a threat or danger. These traumatic experiences can be associated with alexithymia, meaning the inability to identify and describe emotions, difficulties recognizing and communicating their own emotions, and the struggle to recognize and respond to emotions in others, which further lends to a disruption in the sense of agency, memory, time, and continuity.
At Serenity Counseling we encourage the person to break free from the trauma bonds of mistrust, dissociation, shame and terror by connecting their traumatic experience with current life stressors, relationship patterns, and historical factors that infuse their trauma with a profound sense of anomie, unsafely, and helplessness. We listen attentively and bare witness to your life challenges. We guide you in creating meaning of your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, as well as integrate the symbolic meaning, reclaimed disavowed aspects of the inner experiences, and a cohesive trauma narrative. Serenity Counseling raises awareness regarding the impact of trauma on children, adolescents, and adults with CPTSD as well as de-stigmatizes negative views about trauma. Our concerns extend farther than individual behavior, and encompass intra-psychic and interpersonal experiences.
The effects of CPTSD result in severe and pervasive intersubjective disturbances in lived experiences and relationships with others. CPTSD is a persistent and debilitating illness that affects civilians and the military alike. There is a high comorbidity between CPTSD and other psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, and substance use. CPTSD has a significant disruptive quality on a person’s psychic organization as well as realms of their functioning. Continuous exposure to re-experiencing intense and profound distressing threats or events overwhelms the mind’s ability to process the experience and evolves into a personal nightmare or perpetual state of self-imprisonment of a sort. The impact of the trauma can lead to repression and the removal of painful or conflicted memories from conscious awareness, and emotions associated with the event. Many human-trafficked children and military veterans experience CPTSD due to the severity, duration, and frequency of traumas they have had to endure. Because of the complexities associated with the disorder and the lived experiences, these populations can often be overlooked and misunderstood.