Some of The ingredients of My Complex-PTSD
According to cptsdfoundation.org, Complex-ptsd is:
“The results of ongoing, inescapable, relational trauma. Unlike Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Complex PTSD typically involves being hurt by another person. These hurts are ongoing, repeated, and often involve a betrayal and safety loss”.
This blog will reveal some of those hurts and the chronic lack of safety that eventually, at the age of 48, led to a diagnosis of the condition. Some of the later traumas’ names, places, and specific details have been changed or omitted due to legal reasons.
Born into a family where my mother suffered from postnatal depression very early in my life, I was exposed to loss of safety and loss of maternal presence. At around four weeks old, my mother was sectioned and admitted for psychiatric care. I don’t have memories of this time, but the impact on the brain, according to the research into child development and complex trauma, is the same.
I went on to experience a further trauma when, at the age of five, my mother made her first suicide attempt. This led to being taken from my school and home, and being re-homed ninety miles away with my maternal grandma. My brother, eighteen months old at the time, was fostered. My sisters and I joined a new school.
Following this trauma, we were reunited with our mother, only to be exposed to the violent instability of her then-boyfriend, who was later removed forcefully from our home by the police. He turned up at our home, where my three siblings and I were sitting watching Saturday evening TV. His presence was uninvited, and our mother rang the police. It took three male police officers to fight him out of our front room.
Fast forward another eight months or so, and our mother has met another boyfriend. This time, we were subjected to visits to our bedrooms at night. This boyfriend mysteriously left without a reason. In later years, my siblings and I speculated on whether his “attention” towards us was discovered by officials. After all, we were still on the Observation register, having been in and out of care. We spent multiple weekends and overnight stays at an orphanage when my mother had to be re-admitted for her mental health.
There was a period of peace, where my siblings, mother, and I lived without any support from social services. We were taken off the observational register altogether. In hindsight, this was premature. Soon after, the love affair our mother had with alcohol began. This would be the longest of all her affairs and the one that caused the most damage.
I have only described a fraction of the incidents and experiences that my younger self experienced. There were many other examples of abuse, from physical punishment to emotional and psychological, but the purpose of this article was to demonstrate a trend, a pattern of recurring trauma. Complex-PTSD is defined as being exposed to trauma over a prolonged period of years and decades, and there have been many traumatic experiences that followed me into adulthood. This is where the diagnosis became so fitting in my case.
At the age of twenty-five, I experienced a form of abuse from someone I knew that forced me to remain silent for another twenty-five years. This trauma was physical, sexual, and psychological. It was, for me, the most horrific of the traumas, because I couldn’t tell anyone. All the earlier experiences were shared with my siblings, but this experience was so dark and sinister that I suffered in silence.
Remember earlier in the article when I mentioned that certain details cannot be disclosed for legal reasons. After reporting a specific abuse to the police, it was almost impossible for them to convince the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) that I had exhibited a classic trauma response when exposed to the abuse I reported.
I was a young woman, experiencing something beyond my control, which once started, became a secret that I had to become complicit in. I had no choice; if I told, I risked losing my family, and the perpetrator knew this. I depended on this person, and that of my family, for support as I juggled three jobs as a single parent (I was training to be a nurse at this time). For a prolonged period, I existed in a state of freeze, neither facing nor running from the threat.
The fight/flight/freeze response to danger or threat is well known. Dr Peter Levine focuses on the third response, freeze, and compares animals to humans in his observation that animals who are continuously exposed to threat do not exhibit trauma. After years of counselling, I have learned so much about trauma, and I can reflect on this experience with a different perspective. Using the information from Dr Levine, I began to realise that by responding to this particular trauma using the freeze response, I had inadvertently remained in a state of readiness for threat ever since.
Dr Levine describes animals as having the innate ability to “shake” off the energy required for fight/flight/ freeze, after the threat has gone. This is an essential mechanism of the nervous system to restore the body to a calm state. Have you ever noticed dogs shaking after a standoff or a fight with another animal? This is a natural part of calming down after the fight/flight response. I had been exposed to a threat, and the survival response I used was freeze, but I never recharged. I never had the mechanisms to restore a state of calm.
This experience was, by far, the most insidious trauma I have lived through. A year ago, the truth was forced from me. I reached a point where the truth was finding its way to the surface via three years of trauma therapy. During a minor family dispute, the truth that, for so long, I carried alone, erupted into existence.
There is a wealth of information about generational trauma, which I find applicable when I disclosed the abuse I had experienced. Often, when one member of a family decides to report abuse that has been covered up or ignored, they are cast out as the problem. This happened, and is still happening, to me. Textbook. Suddenly, I was silenced. Nobody wanted to hear my truth. I was labelled as the family liar. I wasn’t believed. I was even sent a letter from a solicitor advising me not to speak about the events or risk appearing in court.
I am still processing this experience and the fallout. I have been grieving the loss of family members and the breakdown of relationships. I am still healing the raw wound of not being believed. This has been particularly difficult because those who have turned away from my disclosure have experienced abuse in all the ways I described earlier in the article. However, as my therapist explained to me, during the many sessions I have had with her, my siblings may have some deep trauma wounds of their own to manage.
As I describe all the years of trauma, I still couldn’t capture it all in one article. I haven’t given details about the year my mother jumped off the Humber Bridge in 2019. That is for another blog, another time. I wanted to share some of the experiences that demonstrate the chronic and recurring nature of trauma so central to complex PTSD in the hope that others might share their stories. Often, we feel less alone when we can resonate with the lived experience of others, and I hope this article has been of help.
