What is the difference between C-PTSD and PTSD?
PTSD + The Military
Post-traumatic stress disorder has been historically relegated to the military. That means a seemingly average person joins the military, has no known previous trauma, and finds themSelves inserted in the middle of a horrific situation. These folks are often forced into doing things that they would have never in their lives thought they would be forced to do.
These men and women are professionally groomed, just like the pimps groom the women or the pedophile grooms their victims.
On the back side of that, they are expected to go home and reinsert themSelves into a life that will often be forever changed.
It is always difficult to go backward and reclaim a life that has already been lived with the knowledge of what we have experienced and witnessed.
No one can possibly understand the distance between the two.
The Cycles of CPTSD + PTSD
The cycles and symptoms of C-PTSD are a kaleidoscope of distortion. Ranging from depression, fear, anxiety, Self-hatred, suicide ideation, Self-mutilation, sexual addictions, porn addictions, phobias, isolation, emptiness, fragmentation, dissociation, psychosis, abusive, explosive, substance abuse, insomnia, fibromyalgia, hypervigilant, OCD, syncope, drop attacks, amnesia, neuropathy… And this is just off the top of my head.
Our current system treats each symptom individually and labels it a disorder unto itself, never approaching the cause of fracture in the structure.
You can see the problem here.
For example, if you go to the doctor with a fracture in a bone in your wrist and he treats your pain and does not fix the fracture – the pain and the problem grows and persists.
The fix here is the quantum entanglement of the cysts in time. Einstein claimed that with a force strong enough, we could bend time, folding it in upon itself, creating a loop or a cyst in time. This cystic action removes the loop from the normal access and flow of time, creating an erratic record of memory and the loss of the contents within the loop… Amnesia.
How else would you get up and have breakfast in the morning and have any aspects of childhood remain?
Only after the cystic loops are reintegrated into the flow of time, and the fragments are integrated into the whole of the astral body can we restructure behaviors and thought patterns.
C-PTSD + Childhood Trauma
And then there is Complex Post Traumatic stress disorder. C-PTSD which is repetitive trauma. Such as Child abuse and domestic violence. This is trauma that is systemic and normalized as a way of life. There is no moment of rest because if you do, something is going to sneak up on you.
Unlike a soldier’s war, there is no before and no end in sight. War is all you know.
These traumatic events range from physical, near death, sexual, or maybe all three, just different days. Traumas are big enough to create the same traumatic actions we have relegated to the soldiers.
But let’s remember they had a beginning and end, and their war was outside themSelves.
Their war is not personal. The rage and hatred, violence, and sex are not focused on them in particular. This soldier is not singled out as the one who deserves to be tortured.
On top of all that, children are thrust into a triangular sexual relationship with a married couple.
What if you were a young child and had to get up and have breakfast with this married couple the morning after Daddy was in your room?
How would you deal with that as an adult? Just one 24-hour period.
Mom gets her feathers up and first the side eye, then the accusations as if the child had a choice. Dad tells her to keep quiet, and when he is not in her bedroom, he rages at the sight of her as if he finds her repulsive in the daylight.
You may learn to allow the beatings to take you to another place.
The gaps in memory? The loops? Create Amnesia?
As adults, we look at that and get goosebumps.
Current Modalities
With today’s current modalities ranging from Talk therapy to prolonged exposure therapy, our best hope is to spend the rest of our lives coping and managing minute by minute while our life repeatedly implodes and our bodies slowly deteriorate.
Talk Therapy
Talk therapy for PTSD has three main goals:
- Improve your symptoms
- Teach you skills to deal with it
- Restore your self-esteem
Cognitive processing therapy
With Cognitive Processing Therapy – at first, you’ll talk about the traumatic event then you’ll write in detail about what happened.
No action for change here.
Prolonged exposure therapy
If you’ve been avoiding things that remind you of the traumatic event, PE will help you confront them. It involves eight to 15 sessions, usually 90 minutes each. Early in treatment, your therapist will teach you breathing techniques to ease your anxiety when you think about what happened. Later, you’ll list the things you’ve been avoiding and learn how to face them one by one. In another session, you’ll recount the traumatic experience to your therapist, then go home and listen to a recording of yourself.
Doing this as “homework” over time may help ease your symptoms.
I did some work with a soldier that came to me on the heels of a suicide attempt while undergoing this form of therapy. PE wasn’t enough.
EMDR
With EMDR, you might not have to tell your therapist about your experience. Instead, you concentrate on it while you watch or listen to something they’re doing — maybe moving a hand, flashing a light, or making a sound. The goal is to be able to think about something positive while you remember your trauma. It takes about 3 months of weekly sessions.
Let’s be clear here – only one “experience” is talked about for 3 months in weekly sessions!
3 months for one traumatic experience. No one should have to go through that.
Quantum Therapeutix can relieve the entanglement around one experience in one hour.
Stress inoculation training (SIT)
Stress inoculation training (SIT) is a type of CBT. You can do it by yourself or in a group. You won’t have to go into detail about what happened. The focus is more on changing how you deal with the stress from the event. You might learn massage and breathing techniques and other ways to stop negative thoughts by relaxing your mind and body.
More Coping. More managing. More isolation. We can’t be focused on coping and managing AND interacting with others effectively at the same time.
This is not a solution.
Medication
The brains of people with PTSD process “threats” differently, partly because the balance of chemicals called neurotransmitters are out of whack. They have an easily triggered “fight or flight” response, making you jumpy and on edge. Constantly trying to shut that down could lead to feeling emotionally cold and removed. Medications help you stop thinking about and reacting to what happened, including having nightmares and flashbacks. They can also help you have a more positive outlook on life and feel “normal” again.
Medications may dull things out, but nothing is fixed by ignoring them. Medications serve as a bridge that can create a level of stability while one does the real work.