In recent years, I’ve read about both conditions. Usually, those who have PTSD are from a traumatic moment, that one horrific memory. Whereas, those who have C-PTSD are because they have endured cycles of abuse, either in childhood, or in a relationship.
I have both. My PTSD from after my father’s suicide and my C-PTSD, I think, both from my childhood with verbal and emotional abuse from my father as well as emotional abuse from my relationship with a narcissist for four years.
Today I read something that gave me pause, regarding C-PTSD:
The stress and abuse that you undergo, after being in relationship with a narcissist, causes your cortisol levels to flood. (The stress hormone that we all have, and should, in varying degrees, to keep us safe.) However, when determining “normal” levels, those with C-PTSD and who have undergone significant traumas are high enough that scientists have read that if they were spread out across 2-3 people, they could still be considered high. Such is the effect that continuous emotional abuse can have on you.
It can change your brain chemistry, altering your hormones, and essentially, causing mental illness.
As a result, the hippocampus shrinks, and the amygdala increases. (Your amygdala is your fear response center of your brain.) Whereas, the hippocampus is in charge of sound reasoning; it regulates our behavioral and emotional behavior. Depression and trauma can have brain changes and shrink our hippocampus, and change the way it functions and, as a result, how we behave.
Essentially, your brain is overcompensating for the floods of cortisol that it is producing. And that makes sense, if it is making two to three fold what is considered normal. Produced at such accelerated rates, and over an extended period of time, your brain—the fascinating organ that it is—adapt. It changes. To help us survive. Or, so it thinks that it is doing.
Neurology and brain chemistry and how it shifts to adapt to our lives, to help us survive, is indeed fascinating…and terrifying.
And for those of us with trauma, mental illness, PTSD, C-PTSD, it is useful to remember—
As we (still, unfortunately), live in a world where any mental illnesses are stigmatized and tied to personality or mental weakness or defect, rather than as the physiological conditions that they are.
Personally, I was intrigued to read this. While I knew that C-PTSD could result from an emotionally abusive relationship, I have always connected my own C-PTSD to my family trauma, not my abusive relationship. It’s illuminating to know that I have both, more validation for my trauma and why my brain changed, as a result.
Whether we want to consider it as “mental illness,” which is how the article referred to it, or not—(I have misgivings about using this phrase, because it has historically been tied to chalking up the causes sheerly to genetics, and it has been used to further stigmatized conditions of which there is limited ‘cure,’ both of which I think damages many of us, however inadvertently. However, on the other hand, it could also help to validate an emotional abuse survivor’s condition in recovery and in healing. Your brain changed because you were traumatized.)
Validating experiences in trauma is key to healing for survivors. Sharing stories in safe spaces, and healing and connecting in community is integral to how we heal.