Defining CPTSD

One of my former students recently read my post on Emotional Flashbacks, accessible here, and asked me to differentiate between PTSD and CPTSD. I thought I would take this week to do so.

Though not an official, DSM-5 diagnosis, Complex PTSD is becoming increasingly accepted in the psychiatric community. Pete Walker, the author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving and leading researcher into CPTSD defines Complex PTSD as follows:

Cptsd is a more severe form of Post-raumatic stress disorder. It is delineated from this better known trauma syndrome by five of its most common and troublesome features: emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self-abandonment, a vicious inner critic, and social anxiety.

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            The keynote symptom of CPTSD is the emotional flashback. Contrary to the visual flashbacks of PTSD and CPTSD, the emotional flashback has no visual component. It is a reversion to the emotional state of your trauma. You get all of the emotions, but they are totally out of context. However, this concept is incredibly difficult to understand. Let me give a personal example.

Let’s say I’m watching tv, and a scene with heavy drinking comes onto the screen. Heavy drinking is one of my triggers. In a matter of seconds, my body feels as if it has been set on fire from the inside out. I get really anxious and have to move frantically. If it gets really bad, I collapse to the floor and shake. The sheer terror of the moment feels as if I’m suffocating and hyperventilating simultaneously. My skin actually gets warm to the touch. When it finally releases, you feel like you are a fire that just got water thrown on it. You feel deader than you thought possible. Once, in deep flashback, I had to crawl from my bedroom floor to the front door of the house on my stomach to let my mother in the door so she could help me. It really is truly terrifying.

If you talk to people who struggle with CPTSD, there is almost always an element of heat in the experience of emotional flashbacks. Pete Walker, who also suffered from CPTSD (yes, you can overcome it), says that his flashbacks “felt like a fierce hot wind. I felt like I was being blown away – like my insides were being blown out, as a flame on a candle is blown out.” Interestingly, our two descriptions sound different in some ways but awfully similar in others.

Anyway, hopefully this description helps. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask in the comment area below. Thanks for keeping the dialogue open.