Causes of CPTSD

Started by Kizzie, May 07, 2015, 06:22:16 PM

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Kizzie

Reference: Dr. C. Courtois - http://giftfromwithin.org/html/cptsd-understanding-treatment.html

Complex PTSD results from traumatic events and experiences that are:

(1) repetitive, prolonged, or cumulative

(2 ) most often interpersonal, involving direct harm, exploitation, and maltreatment including neglect/abandonment/antipathy by primary caregivers or other ostensibly responsible adults, and

(3) often occur at developmentally vulnerable times in the victim's life, especially in early childhood or adolescence, but can also occur later in life and in conditions of vulnerability associated with disability/ disempowerment/dependency/age /infirmity, and so on.

Child abuse of all types (physical, sexual, emotional, and neglect) within the family is the most common form of chronic interpersonal victimization. Such abuse is often founded on problematic and insecure attachment relationships (between parent and child or others who have primary caretaking responsibilities). Parents and other caregivers who abuse exploit a child's physical and emotional immaturity and dependent status to meet their own needs or do so in response to their own inadequacies or distress, quite often their own history of unresolved trauma and/or loss.

Rather than creating conditions of protection and security within the relationship, abuse by primary attachment figures instead becomes the cause of great distress and creates conditions of gross insecurity and instability for the child including misgivings about the trustworthiness of others....

Rather than having a secure and relatively carefree childhood, abused children are worried and hypervigilant. The psychological energy that would normally go to learning and development instead goes to coping and survival.....

Child abuse, occurring in the context of essential relationships, involves significant betrayal of the responsibilities of those relationships...