Complex Ptsd Recovery Understanding and treating Complex Trauma Using Emdr and Concepts from Individual Psychology

By Brittany Forrester

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder that may occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, a severe accident, a terrorist act, war/combat, or rape or who have been threatened with death, sexual violence or severe injury.

PTSD can occur in all people of any ethnicity, nationality, culture, and age. PTSD affects approximately 3.5 percent of U.S. adults every year. An estimated one in 11 people will be diagnosed with PTSD in their lifetime. Women are twice as likely as men to have PTSD.

People with PTSD have intense, disturbing thoughts and feelings related to their experience that last long after the traumatic event. They may relive the event through flashbacks or nightmares; they may feel sadness, fear, or anger; and they may feel detached or estranged from other people. People with PTSD may avoid situations or people that remind them of the traumatic event, and they may have strong adverse reactions to something as ordinary as a loud noise or an accidental touch.

People with a diagnosis of PTSD are defended and insecure about many things in life. To begin the process of healing in a therapeutic environment, it is important to create a safe place in which the individual can explore and share their experiences and understand why they are experiencing life as they do. This book may offer much to promote the healing and growth of those affected by complex trauma.

• Language: English
• Publisher: vincenzo nappi
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201337834

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Table of Contants

INTRODUCTION

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

History of PTSD

Diagnosis of PTSD

Understanding Complex Trauma

Defining Complex Trauma

Diagnosis of Complex Trauma

Neurobiology

Brain Science

The Brain and Trauma

The Brain and Complex Trauma

The Therapeutic Culture

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

Trauma

Complex Trauma

Individual Psychology

Trauma

Complex Trauma

Psychology of Use

Lifestyle

Treatment for Complex Trauma

Current Research

EMDR: The Treatment of Choice

EMDR

Eye Movements

Adaptive Information Processing (AIP)

Three-Pronged Approach

Phases of EMDR Treatment

Phase One: History Taking and Treatment Planning

Phase Two: Preparation

Phases Three through Seven: Reprocessing

Phase Eight: Reevaluation

Phases Three through Eight: Three Prongs

Conclusion

INTRODUCTION

Post-traumatic stress disorder is the emblematic mental illness of the early twenty-first century. PTSD marks the current era as much as anxiety dominated the post–World War II period and depression the two decades after the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was developed in 1980. Traumas and their psychological consequences are the stock-in-trade of daytime talk shows, popular movies, television documentaries, and news programs. A large industry has developed that encompasses trauma specialists, grief counselors, lawyers, and claimants. Laypersons routinely use the term PTSD to describe their reactions to stressful events.

As recently as 1980, the sorts of events that were considered to be traumas were limited to extreme stressors such as military combat, rape, severe assault, and natural or man-made disasters. Since that time, the range of traumas has expanded to include hearing hate speech, learning of a relative’s death, or watching a catastrophe unfold on television. Virtually the entire population experiences such as traumas during their lifetimes. The number of individuals who develop PTSD after these events have also soared.

In contrast to the initial studies of how many people suffer from PTSD, which showed rates of only about 1 percent, more recent reports indicate figures approximately ten times that number. Western and, increasingly, most cultures now routinely assume that people who are exposed to traumas will develop serious and recurrent negative psychological consequences.

Mental health specialists typically predict that a pandemic of traumatic psychic conditions will arise after man-made and natural disasters. As a result, trauma counselors have become entrenched in schools, work organizations, hospitals, and police and fire departments to deal with the expected psychological results of disturbing experiences. At the extreme, some instructors in colleges and universities use trigger warnings on reading material they feel might precipitate PTSD among their students.

PTSD has become so embedded in current culture and medicine that it is easy to forget that the idea that traumas can cause mental disorders is a relatively recent notion. In contrast to depression, mania, and other conditions that have been recurrent medical and psychiatric concerns, PTSD and its predecessor diagnoses—soldier’s heart, railroad spine, shell shock, and combat neurosis—only became recognizable psychiatric disorders in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Even then, claims of psychological trauma were commonly subject to suspicion and efforts to discredit them. The present expectation that dire and enduring psychological consequences will develop after stressful events stands in stark opposition to the resistance that traumatic diagnoses faced from both the medical establishment and the general culture for most of their brief history.

The relative newness of traumatic diagnoses contrasts with the perpetual presence of the kinds of events that produce PTSD.

Combat, rape, severe physical assaults, disasters, serious accidents, and the like have been consistent occurrences throughout history. Indeed, violent conflicts, early deaths, sexual abuse, and disastrous natural calamities were far more common in past centuries than at present. This raises the question of why PTSD has been considered to be a widespread medical problem only in recent periods.

Perhaps more than any other diagnostic category, PTSD is a vehicle for showing major historical changes in conceptions of mental illness. The inherent link between PTSD symptoms and traumatic events roots this condition in social and cultural forces to an unusually great extent among mental illnesses. Huge variations have existed over time about which conditions are likely to produce traumas, what are the results of traumas, who are susceptible to becoming traumatized, and how to evaluate the claims of trauma victims. The current Age of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a product of changing views of the relationship of individuals to their environments and consequent notions of victimhood and vulnerability. The transformation of PTSD from a suspect toa ubiquitous psychiatric condition stemmed from reorientations in professional, cultural, and moral ideas about what constitutes a legitimate mental illness, what kinds of people can develop traumas, and what responses are appropriate for them. What, then, is PTSD?

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

Post-traumatic stress disorders have four central components. The first is that some external trauma has overwhelmed a person’s capacity to cope with the experience. The term trauma itself stems from the Greek word for wound, which connotes some injury or shock. In contrast to many mental illnesses that arise from some inner vulnerability, PTSD definitionally stems from a disturbance that is outside of the individual. Some traumas involve human agency, for example, combat, assaults, rapes, serious accidents, or terrorism; others stem from such natural causes as floods, hurricanes, or earthquakes. PTSD indicates a link between a prior negatively valued disruption and some present form of psychic suffering.

Because PTSD intrinsically entails some environmental trauma does not mean that individual and cultural interpretations of what is traumatic are irrelevant. Different people have highly variable thresholds of what they perceive as horrific or upsetting, so the emergence, nature, and severity of the traumatic event itself do not fully correspond to the intensity and persistence of post-traumatic symptoms. Personal appraisals of the traumatic quality of events themselves are heavily dependent on collectively held interpretations. Sharp boundaries between traumatic and nontraumatic stressors do not exist in nature. Different cultures draw lines in different places between events that expectably lead to pathological symptoms and those that do not; events that are traumatic in one place or time might be habitual in others. For example, the battle was less of a shock